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HEART OF MAN 



BY 



/ 

GEOEGE EDWAED WOODBEEEY 



" Deep in the general heart of men " 

— Wordsworth 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 

1899 

All rights reserved 






29414 



Copyright, 1899, 
By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. 






i-i£lVEO, 



( API) 5 -1899 



Nortoooij }|k88 

J. S. Cushini! St Co. — Berwick & Smith 
Norwood Mass. U.S.A. 



f O'h 



Ed tfiz Plemotg of 
EUGENE MONTGOMERY 

MY FRIEND 

DEAR WAS HIS PRAISE, AND PLEASANT 'T WERE TO MB, 

ON WHOSE FAR GRAVE TO-NIGHT THE DEEP SNOWS DRIFT; 

IT NEEDS NOT NOW; TOGETHER WE SHALL SEE 

HOW HIGH CHRIST'S LILIES O'eR MAN'S LAURELS LIFT. 

Febkttary 13, 1899. 



PREFACE 

Of the papers contained in this volume 
'' Taormina " was published in the Century 
Magazine ; the others are new. The intention 
of the author was to illustrate how poetry, poli- 
tics, and religion are the flowering of the same 
human spirit, and have their feeding roots in 
a common soil, "deep in the general heart of 



Columbia College, 
February 22, 1899. 



CONTENTS 

PAGB 

TAORMINA 1 

A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 73 

DEMOCRACY 211 

THE RIDE 263 



TAORMINA 



TAORMINA 



What should there be in the glimmering 
lights of a poor fishing-village to fascinate me ? 
Far below, a mile perhaps, I behold them in 
the darkness and the storm like some phospho- 
rescence of the beach ; I see the pale tossing of 
the surf beside them ; I hear the continuous 
roar borne up and softened about these heights ; 
and this is night at Taormina. There is a 
weirdness in the scene — the feeling without 
the reality of mystery ; and at evening, I know 
not why, I cannot sleep without stepping upon 
the terrace or peering through the panes to see 
those lights. At morning the charm has flown 
from the shore to the further heights above 
me. I glance at the vast banks of southward- 
lying cloud that envelop Etna, like deep fog 
upon the ocean ; and then, inevitably, my eyes 
seek the double summit of the Taorminian 
mountain, rising nigh at hand a thousand feet, 

3 



4 HEART OF MAN 

almost sheer, less than half a mile westward. 
The nearer height, precipice-faced, towers full 
in front with its crowning ruined citadel, and 
discloses, just below the peak, on an arm of rock 
toward its right, a hermitage church among the 
heavily hanging mists. The other horn of the 
massive hill, somewhat more remote, behind and 
to the old castle's left, exposes on its slightly- 
loftier crest the edge of a hamlet. It, too, is 
cloud- wreathed — the lonely crag of Mola. Over 
these hilltops, I know, mists will drift and 
touch all day ; and often they darken threaten- 
ingly, and creep softly down the slopes, and 
fill the next-lying valley, and roll, and lift 
again, and reveal the flank of Monte d'Oro 
northward on the far-reaching range. As I 
was walking the other day, with one of these 
floating showers gently blowing in my face 
down this defile, I noticed, where the mists 
hung in fragments from the cloud out over the 
gulf, how like air-shattered arches they groined 
the profound ravine ; and thinking how much 
of the romantic charm which delights lovers of 
the mountains and the sea springs from such 
Gothic moods of nature, I felt for a moment 
something of the pleasure of recognition in 



TAORMINA 5 

meeting with this northern and familiar ele- 
ment in the Sicilian landscape. 

One who has grown to be at home with na- 
ture cannot be quite a stranger anywhere on 
earth. In new lands 1 find the poet's old do- 
main. It is not only from the land-side that 
these intimations of old acquaintance come. 
When my eyes leave, as they will, the near 
girdle of rainy mountain tops, and range home 
at last upon the sea, something familiar is there 
too, — that which I have always known, — but 
marvellously transformed and heightened in 
beauty and power. Such sudden glints of sun- 
shine in the offing through unseen rents of 
heaven, as brilliant as in mid-ocean, I have be- 
held a thousand times, but here they remind 
me rather of cloud-lights on far western plains ; 
and where have I seen those still tracts of 
changeful colour, iridescent under the silvery 
vapours of noon ; or, when the weather freshens 
and darkens, those whirlpools of pure emerald 
bright in the gray expanse of storm? They 
seem like memories of what has been, made 
fairer. One recurring scene has the same fas- 
cination for my eyes as the fishers' lights. It 
is a simple picture : only an arm of mist thrust- 



6 HEART OF MAN 

iiig out from yonder lowland by the little cape, 
and making a near horizon, where, for half an 
hour, the waves break with great dashes of 
purple and green, deep and angry, against the 
insubstantial mole. All day I gaze on these 
sights of beauty until it seems that nature her- 
self has taken on nobler forms forever more. 
When the mountain storm beats the pane at 
midnight, or the distant lightnings awake me 
in the hour before dawn, I can forget in what 
climate I am ; but the oblivion is conscious, 
and half a memory of childhood nights : in an 
instant comes the recollection, " I am on the 
coasts, and these are the couriers, of Etna." 

The very rain is strange : it is charged with 
obscure personality; it is the habitation of a 
new presence, a storm-genius that I have never 
known ; it is born of Etna, whence all things 
here have being and draw nourishment. It is 
not rain, but the rain-cloud, spread out over the 
valleys, the precipices, the sounding beaches, 
the ocean-plain ; it is not a storm, but a season. 
It does not rise with the moist Hyades, or ride 
with cloudy Orion in the Mediterranean night ; 
it does not pass like Atlantic tempests on great 
world-currents : it remains. Its home is upon 



TAORMINA 7 

jomes and thither it returns ; 
sperses, lightens and darkens, 
at, and though it suffer the 
or the west, to divide its veils 
1 it draws the folds together 
It obeys only Etna, who sends 
;h clouds and thick darkness 
es its face : it is the Sicilian 

II 

1 not withdraw continuously 
Bven in this season. On the 
est, I was told it would bring 
id I was not deceived. Two 
ely wrapped in impenetrable 
Ird morning, as I threw open 
stepped out upon the terrace, 
native winter, expanding its 
ler the double radiance of 
spreading from its extreme 
ad upward, and of the snow- 
fair drifts shone far down the 
nd groves were visible, cloth- 
• zone, and between lay the 
I near in that air, but it is 



6 HEART OF MAN 

iiig out from yonder lowland by 1 
and making a near horizon, whe: 
hour, the waves break with gr 
purple and green, deep and ang] 
insubstantial mole. All day I 
sights of beauty until it seems th 
self has taken on nobler forms 
When the mountain storm beat 
midnight, or the distant lightni 
in the hour before dawn, I can : 
climate I am ; but the oblivioi 
and half a memory of childhood 
instant comes the recollection, 
coasts, and these are the couriers 
The very rain is strange : it i^ 
obscure personality; it is the ] 
new presence, a storm-genius th 
known ; it is born of Etna, wh 
here have being and draw nour 
not rain, but the rain-cloud, spre 
valleys, the precipices, the sou 
the ocean-plain ; it is not a stori 
It does not rise with the moist 
with cloudy Orion in the Medit( 
it does not pass like Atlantic tei 
world-currents : it remains. Il 



TAORMINA 7 

Etna ; thence it comes and thither it returns ; 
it gathers and disperses, lightens and darkens, 
blows and is silent, and though it suffer the 
clear north wind, or the west, to divide its veils 
with heaven, again it draws the folds together 
about its abode. It obeys only Etna, who sends 
ix> forth ; then with clouds and thick darkness 
the mountain hides its face : it is the Sicilian 
winter. 

II 

But Etna does not withdraw continuously 
from its children even in this season. On the 
third day, at farthest, I was told it would bring 
back the sun; and I was not deceived. Two 
days it was closely wrapped in impenetrable 
gray ; but the third morning, as I threw open 
my casement and stepped out upon the terrace, 
I saw it, like my native winter, expanding its 
broad flanks under the double radiance of 
dazzling clouds spreading from its extreme 
summit far out and upward, and of the snow- 
fields whose long fair drifts shone far down the 
sides. Villages and groves were visible, cloth- 
ing all the lower zone, and between lay the 
plain. It seemed near in that air, but it is 



8 HEAKT OF MAN 

twelve miles away. From the sea-dipping base 
to the white cone the slope measures more than 
twenty miles, and as many more conduct the 
eye downward to the western fringe — a vast 
bulk ; yet one does not think of its size as he 
gazes ; so large a tract the eye takes in, but no 
more realizes than it does the distance of the 
stars. High up, forests peer through the ribbed 
snows, and extinct craters stud the frozen scene 
with round hollow mounds innumerable. A 
thousand features, but it remains one mighty 
mountain. How natural it seems for it to be 
sublime ! It is the peer of the sea and of the 
sky. All day it flashed and darkened under 
the rack, and I rejoiced in the sight, and knew 
why Pindar called it the pillar of heaven ; and 
at night it hooded itself once more with the 
winter cloud. 

Ill 

Would you see this land as I see it ? Come 
then, since Etna gives a fair, pure morning, 
up over the shelving bank to the great eastern 
spur of Taormina, where stood the hollow 
theatre, now in ruins, and above it the small 
temple with which the Greeks surmounted the 



TAORMINA 9 

highest point. It is such a spot as they often 
chose for their temples ; but none ever com- 
manded a more noble prospect. The far-shin- 
ing sea, four or five hundred feet below, washes 
the narrow, precipitous descent, and on each 
hand is disclosed the whole of that side of 
Sicily which faces the rising sun. To the left 
and northward are the level straits, with the 
Calabrian mountains opposite, thinly sown with 
light snow, as far as the Cape of Spartivento, 
distinctly seen, though forty miles away ; in 
front expands the open sea ; straight to the 
south runs the indented coast, bay and beach, 
point after point, to v/here, sixty miles distant, 
the great blue promontory of Syracuse makes 
far out. On the land-side Etna fills the south 
with its lifted snow-fields, now smoke-plumed 
at the languid cone ; and thence, though linger- 
ingly, the eye ranges nearer over the interven- 
ing plain to the well- wooded ridge of Castiglione, 
and, next, to the round solitary top of Monte 
Maestra, with its long shoreward descent, and 
comes to rest on the height of Taormina over- 
head, with its hermitage of Santa Maria della 
Rocca, its castle, and Mola. Yet further off, 
at the head of the defile, looms the barren sum- 



10 HEART OF MAN 

mit of Monte Venere, with Monte d'Oro and 
other hills in the foreground, and northward, 
peak after peak, travels the close Messina 
range. 

A landscape of sky, sea, plain, and moun- 
tains, great masses majestically grouped, grand 
in contour ! Yet to call it sublime does not 
render the impression it makes upon the soul. 
Sublime, indeed, it is at times, and dull were 
he whose heart from hour to hour awe does 
not visit here ; but constantly the scene is 
beautiful, and yields that delight which dwells 
unwearied with the soul. One may be seldom 
touched to the exaltation which sublimity im- 
plies, but to take pleasure in loveliness is the 
habit of one who lives as heaven made him ; 
and what characterizes this landscape and sets 
it apart is the permanence of its beauty, its 
perpetual and perfect charm through every 
change of light and weather, and in every 
quarter of its heaven and earth, felt equally 
whether the eye sweeps the great circuit with 
its vision, or pauses on the nearer features, for 
they, too, are wonderfully composed. This hill 
of my station falls down for half a mile with 
broken declivities, and then becomes the Cape 



TAOEMINA 11 

of Taormina, and takes its steep plunge into 
the sea. Yonder picturesque peninsula to its 
left, diminished by distance and strongly re- 
lieved on the purple waves, is the Cape of 
Sant' Andrea, and beside it a cluster of small 
islands lies nearer inshore. On the other side, 
to the right of our own cape, shines our port, 
with Giardini, the village of my fishers' lights, 
the beach with its boats, and the white main 
road winding in the narrow level between the 
bluffs and the sands. The port is guarded on 
the south by the peninsula of Schiso, where 
ancient Naxos stood ; and just beyond, the 
river Alcantara cuts the plain and flows to the 
sea. At the other extremity, northward of 
Sant' Andrea, is the cove of Letojanni, with its 
village, and then, perhaps eight miles away, 
the bold headland of Sant' Alessio closes the 
shore view with a mass of rock that in former 
times completely shut off the land approach 
hither, there being no passage over it, and 
none around it except by the strip of sand 
when the sea was quiet. All this ground, with 
its several villages, from Sant' Alessio to the 
Alcantara, and beyond into the plain, was 
anciently the territory of Taormina. 



12 HEAET OF MAN 

The little city itself lies on its hill, between 
the bright shore and the gray old castle, on a 
crescent-like terrace whose two horns jut out 
into the air like capes. The northern one of 
these is my station, the site of the old temple 
and the amphitheatre ; the southern one op- 
posite shows the facade of the Dominican con- 
vent ; and the town circles between, possibly 
a mile from spur to spur. Here and there long 
broken lines of the ancient wall, black with 
age, stride the hillside. A round Gothic tower, 
built as if for warfare, a square belfry, a ruined 
gateway, stand out among the humble roofs. 
Gardens of orange and lemon trees gleam like 
oblong parks, principally on the upper edge 
toward the great rock. If you will climb, as I 
have done, the craggy plateau close by, which 
overhangs the theatre and obstructs the view 
of the extreme end of the town at this point, 
you Avill see from its level face, rough with the 
plants of the prickly-pear, a cross on an emi- 
nence just below, and the gate toward Messina. 

The face of the country is bare. Here be- 
neath, where the main ravine of Taormina cuts 
into the earth between the two spurs of the 
city, are terraces of fruit trees and vegetables. 



TAORMINA 13 

and, wherever the naked rock permits, similar 
terraces are seen on the castle hill and every 
less steep slope, looking as if they would slide 
off. Almond and olive trees cling and climb 
all over the hillsides, but their boughs do not 
clothe the country. It is gray to look at, be- 
cause of the masses of natural rock everywhere 
cropping out, and also from the substructure of 
the terraces, which, seen from below, present 
banks of the same gray stone. The only colour 
is given by the fan-like plants of the prickly- 
pear, whose flat, thick-lipped, pear-shaped 
leaves, stuck with thorns, and often extruding 
their reddish fruit from the edge, lend a dull 
green to the scene. This plant grows every- 
where, like wild bush, to a man's height, cover- 
ing the otherwise infertile soil, and the goats 
crop it. A closer view shows patches of wild 
candytuft and marigolds, like those at my feet, 
and humble purple and blue blossoms hang 
from crannies or run over the stony turf ; but 
these are not strong enough to be felt in the 
prevalent tones. The blue of ocean, the white 
of Etna, the gray of Taormina — this is the 
scene. 

Three ways connect the town with the lower 



14 HEART OF MAN 

world. The modern carriage road runs from 
the Messina gate, and, quickly dropping behind 
the northern spur, winds in great serpentine 
loops between the Campo Santo below and 
old wayside tombs, Roman and Arabic, above, 
until it slowly opens on the southern outlook, 
and, after two miles of tortuous courses above 
the lovely coves, comes out on the main road 
along the coast. The second way starts from 
the other end of the town, the gate toward 
Etna, and goes down more precipitously along 
the outer flank of the southern spur, with Mola 
(here shifted to the other side of the castle hill) 
closing the deep ravine behind ; and at last it 
empties into the torrent of Selina, in whose bed 
it goes on to Giardini. The third, or short 
way, leaps down the great hollow of the spurs, 
and yet keeps to a ridge between the folds of 
the ravine which it discloses on each side, 
with here and there a contadino cutting rock 
on the steep hillsides, or a sportsman wander- 
ing with his dog ; or often at twilight, from 
some coign of vantage, you may see the goats 
trooping home across the distant sands by the 
sea. It debouches through great limestone 
quarries on the main road. There, seen from 



TAORMINA 15 

below, Taormina comes out — a cape, a town, 
and a hill. It is, in fact, a long, steep, broken 
ridge, shaped like a wedge ; one end of the 
broad face dips into the sea, the other, high 
on land, exposes swelling bluffs ; its back bears 
the town, its point lifts the castle. 

This is the Taorminian land. What a quie- 
tude hangs over it ! How poor, how mean, how 
decayed the little town now looks amid all this 
silent beauty of enduring nature ! It could not 
have been always so. This theatre at my feet, 
hewn in the living rock, flanked at each end 
by great piers of massive Roman masonry, 
and showing broken columns thick strewn in 
the midst of the broad orchestra, tells of an- 
cient splendour and populousness. The narrow 
stage still stands, with nine columns in posi- 
tion in two groups ; part are shattered half-way 
up, part are yet whole, and in the gap be- 
tween the groups shines the lovely sea with 
the long southern coast, set in the beauty of 
these ruins as in a frame. Here Attic trage- 
dies were once played, and Roman gladiators 
fought. The enclosure is large, much over a 
hundred yards in diameter. It held many 
thousands. Whence came the people to fill 



16 HEART OF MAN 

it ? I noticed by the roadside, as I came up, 
Saracenic tombs. I saw in the first square I 
entered those small Norman windows, with the 
lovely pillars and the round arch. On the 
ancient church I have observed the ornamen- 
tation and mouldings of Byzantine art. The 
Virgin with her crown, over the fountain, was 
paltry enough, but I saw that this was origi- 
nally a mermaid's statue. A Avater-clock here, 
a bath there ; in all quarters I come on some 
slight, poor relics of other ages ; and always in 
the faces of the people, where every race seems 
to have set its seal, T see the ruins of time. 
These echoes are not all of far-off things. That 
lookout below was a station of English can- 
non, I am told ; and the bluff over Giardini, 
beyond the torrent, takes its name from the 
French tents pitched there long ago. The 
old walls can be traced for five miles, but 
now the circuit is barely two. I wonder, as 
I go down to my room in the Casa Timeo, 
what was the past of this silent town, now so 
shrunken from its ancient limits ; and who, I 
ask myself, was Timeo ? 



TAORMINA 17 

IV 

I thought when I first saw the inaccessi- 
bility of this mountain-keep that I should 
have no walks except upon the carriage road ; 
but I find there are paths innumerable. Leap 
the low walls where I will, I come on unsus- 
pected ways broad enough for man and beast. 
They run down the hillsides in all directions, 
and are ever dividing as they descend, like 
the branching streams of a waterfall. Some 
are rudely paved, and hemmed by low walls ; 
others are mere footways on the natural rock 
and earth, often edging precipices, and open- 
ing short cross-cuts in the most unexpected 
places, not without a suggestion of peril, to 
make eye and foot alert, and to infuse a cer- 
tain wild pleasure into the exercise. The mul- 
tiplicity of these paths is a great boon to the 
lover of beauty, for here one charm of Italian 
landscape exists in perfection. Every few mo- 
ments the scene rearranges itself in new com- 
binations, as on the Riviera or at Amalfi, and 
makes an endless succession of lovely pictures. 
The infinite variety of these views is not to be 
imagined unless it has been witnessed ; and 



18 HEART OF MAN 

besides the magic wrought by mere change 
of position, there is also a constant transfor- 
mation of tone and colour from hour to hour, 
as the lights and shadows vary, and from day 
to day, with the unsettled weather. 

Yet who could convey to black-and-white 
speech the sense of beauty which is the better 
part of my rambles? It is only to say that 
here I went up and down on the open hill- 
sides, and there I followed the ridges or kept 
the cliff-line above the fair coves; that now I 
dropped down into the vales, under the shade 
of olive and lemon branches, and wound by 
the gushing streams through the orchards. In 
every excursion I make some discovery, and 
bring home some golden store for memory. 
Yesterday I found the olive slopes over Leto- 
janni — beautiful old gnarled trees, such as I 
have never seen except where the nightingales 
sing by the eastern shore of Spezzia. I did 
not doubt when I was told that these orchards 
yield the sweetest oil in the world. It was 
the lemon harvest, and everywhere were piles 
of the pale yellow fruit heaped like apples 
under the slender trees, with a gatherer here 
and there ; for this is always a landscape of 



TAORMINA 19 

solitary figures. To-day I found the little 
beach of San Nicolo, not far from the same 
place. I kept inland, going down the hollow 
by the Campo Santo, where there is a cool, 
gravelly stream in a dell that is like a nook 
in the Berkshire hills, and then along the 
upland on the skirts of Monte d'Oro, till by 
a sharp turn seaward I came out through a 
marble quarry where men were working with 
what seemed slow implements on the gray or 
party-coloured stone. I passed through the 
rather silent group, who stopped to look at 
me, and a short distance beyond I crossed the 
main road, and went down by a stream to the 
shore. I found it strewn with seaside rock, 
as a hundred other beaches are, but none with 
rocks like these. They were marble, red or 
green, or shot with variegated hues, with 
many a soft gray, mottled or wavy-lined ; and 
the sea had polished them. Very lovely they 
were, and shone where the low wave gleamed 
over them. I had wondered at the profusion 
of marbles in the Italian churches, but I had 
not thought to find them wild on a lonely 
Sicilian beach. Once or twice already I had 
seen a block rosy in the torrent-beds, and it 



20 HEART OE MAN 

had seemed a rare sight ; but here the whole 
shore was piled and inlaid with the beautiful 
stone. 

I have learned now that Taormina is famous 
for these marbles. Over thirty varieties were 
sent to the Vienna Exhibition, and they won 
the prize. I got this information from the 
keeper of the Communal Library, with whom 
I have made friends. He recalls to my mem- 
ory the ship that Hieron of Syracuse gave to 
Ptolemy, wonderful for its size. It had 
twenty banks of rowers, three decks, and 
space to hold a library, a gymnasium, gardens 
with trees in them, stables, and baths, and 
towers for assault, and it was provided by 
Archimedes with many ingenious mechanical 
devices. The wood of sixty ordinary galleys 
was required for its construction. I describe 
it because its architect, Fi^lea, was a Taormin- 
ian by birth, and esteemed in his day second 
only to Archimedes in his skill in mechanics ; 
and in lining the baths of this huge galley he 
used these beautiful Taorminian marbles. My 
friend the librarian told me also, with his 
Sicilian burr, of the wine of Taormina, the \ 
Eugensean, which was praised by Pliny, and 



TAOKMINA 21 

used at the sacred feasts of Rome ; but now, 
lie said sadly, the grape had lost its flavour. 

The sugar-cane, which flourished in later 
times, is also gone. But the mullet that is 
celebrated in Juvenal's verse, and the lam- 
preys that once went to better Alexandrian 
luxury, are still the spoil of the fishers, the 
shrimps are delicate to the palate, and the 
marbles will endure as long as this rock it- 
self. The rock lasts, and the sea. The most 
ancient memory here is of them, for this is 
the shore of Charybdis. It is stated in Sal- 
lust and other Latin authors, as well as by 
writers throughout the Middle Ages, that all 
which was swallowed up in the whirlpool of 
the straits, after being carried beneath the 
sea for miles, was finally cast up on the beach 
beneath the hill of Taormina. 

The rock and the sea were finely blended 
in one of my first discoveries in the land, and 
in consequence they have seemed, to my im- 
agination, more closely united here than is com- 
mon. On a stormy afternoon I had strolled 
down the main road, and was walking toward 
Letojanni. I came, after a little, to a great 
cliff that overhung the sea, with room for the 



22 HEART OF MAN 

road to pass beneath; and as I drew near I 
heard a strange sound, a low roaring, a deep- 
toned reverberation, that seemed not to come 
from the breaking waves, loud on the beach : 
it was a more solemn, a more piercing and 
continuous sound. It was from the rock it- 
self. The grand music of the rolling sea be- 
neath was taken up by the hollowed cliff, and 
reechoed with a mighty volume of sound from 
invisible sources. It seemed the voice of the 
rock, as if by long sympathy and neighbour- 
hood in that lonely place the cliff were inter- 
penetrated with the sea-music, and had become 
resonant of itself with those living harmonies 
heard only in the Psalmist's song. It seemed 
a lyre for the centuries ; and I thought over 
how many a conqueror, how many a race, that 
requiem had been lifted upon it as they passed 
to their death on this shore. I came back 
slowly in the twilight, and was roused from 
my reverie by the cold wind breathing on me 
as I reached the top of the hill, pure and keen 
and frosted like the bright December breezes 
of my own land. It was the kiss of Etna on 
my cheek. 



TAORMINA 23 



Will you hear the legend of Taormina ? — 
for in these days I dare not call it history. 
Noble and romantic it is, and age-long. I had 
not hoped to recover it ; but my friend the 
librarian has brought me books in which pa- 
triotic Taorminians have written the story cele- 
brating their dear city. I was touched by the 
simplicity with which he informed me that the 
town authorities had been unwilling to waste 
on a passing stranger these little paper-bound 
memorials of their city. " But," he said, " I 
told them I had given you my word." So I 
possess these books with a pleasant association 
of Sicilian honour, and I have read them with 
real interest. As I turned the pages I was re- 
minded once more how impossible it is to know 
the past. The past survives in human institu- 
tions, in the temperament of races, and in the 
creations of ideal art ; but only in the last is it 
immortal. Custom and law are for an age ; 
race after race is pushed to the sea, and dies ; 
only epic and saga and psalm have one date 
with man, one destiny with the breath of his 
lips, one silence at the last with tliem. Least 



24 HEART OF MAN 

of all does the past survive in the living memo- 
ries of men. Here and there the earth cherishes 
a coin or a statue, the desert embalms some 
solitary city, a few leagues of rainless air pre- 
serve on rock and column the lost speech of 
Nile ; so the mind of man holds in dark places, 
or lifts to living fame, no more than ruins and 
fragments of the life that was. I have been a 
diligent reader of books in my time ; and here 
in an obscure corner of the Old- World I find a 
narrative studded with noble names, not undis- 
tinguished by stirring deeds, and, save for the 
great movements of history and a few shadowy 
figures, it is all fresh to my mind. I have 
looked on three thousand years of human life 
upon this hill ; something of what they have 
yielded, if you will have patience with such a 
tract of time, I will set down. 

My author is Monsignore Giovanni di Gio- 
vanni, a Taorminian, who flourished in the last 
century. He was a man of vast erudition, and 
there is in his pages that Old- World learning 
which delights me. He was born before the 
days of historic doubt. He tells a true story. 
To allege an authority is with him to prove a 
fact, and to cite all writers who repeat the orig- 



TAORMINA 26 

inal source is to render truth impregnable. 
Rarely does he show any symptom of the 
modern malady of incredulity. Scripta littera 
is reason enough, unless the fair fame of his 
city chances to be at stake. He was really 
learned, and I do wrong to seem to diminish his 
authority. He was a patient investigator of 
manuscripts, and did important service to Sicil- 
ian history. The simplicity I have alluded to 
affects mainly the ecclesiastical part of his nar- 
rative. A few statements also in regard to the 
prehistoric period might disturb the modern 
mind, but I own to finding in them the charm 
of lost things. In my mental provinces I wel- 
come the cave-man, the flint-maker, the lake- 
dweller, and all their primitive tribes to the 
abode of science ; but I feel them to be in- 
truders in my antiquity. I was brought up on 
quite other chronologies, and I still like a his- 
tory that begins with the flood. I will not, 
however, ask any one of more serious mind to 
go back with Monsignore and myself to the era 
of autochthonous Sicily, when the children of 
the Cyclops inhabited the land, and Demeter 
in her search for Proserpina wept on this hill, 
and Charybdis lay stretched out under these 



26 HEART OF MAN 

bluffs watching the sea. It is precise enough 
to say that Taormina began eighty years before 
the Trojan War. Very dimly, it must be ac- 
knowledged, the ancient Sicani are seen arriv- 
ing and driven, like all doomed races, south and 
west out of the land, and in their place the 
Siculi flourish, and a Samnite colony voyages 
over the straits from Italy and joins them. 
Here for three centuries these sparse communi- 
ties lived along these heights in fear of the sea 
pirates, and warred confusedly from their main- 
hold on Mount Taurus, or the Bull, so called 
because the two summits of the mountain from 
a distance resemble a bull's horns; and they 
left no other memory of themselves. 

Authentic history begins toward the end of 
the eighth century before our era. It is a bright 
burst ; for then, down by yonder green-foaming 
rock, the young Greek mariners leaped on the 
strand. This was their first land-fall in Sicily ; 
that rock, their Plymouth ; and here, doubtless, 
the alarmed mountaineers stood in their fastness 
and watched the bearers of the world's torch, 
and knew them not, bringing daybreak to the 
dark island for evermore, but fought, as bar- 
barism will, against the light, and were at last 



TAORMINA 27 

made friends with it — a chance that does not 
always befall. Then quickly rose the lowland 
city of Naxos, and by the river sprang up the 
temple to Guiding Apollo, the earliest shrine 
of the Sicilian Greeks, where they came ever 
afterward to pray for a prosperous voyage 
when they would go across the sea, homeward. 
They were from the first a fighting race ; and 
decade by decade the cloud of war grew heavier 
on each horizon, southward from Syracuse and 
northward from Messina, and swords beat fiercer 
and stronger with the rivalries of growing 
states — battles dimly discerned now. A single 
glimpse flashes out on the page of Thucydides. 
He relates that when once the Messenians 
threatened Naxos with overthrow, the moun- 
taineers rushed down from the heights in great 
numbers to the relief of their Greek neighbours, 
and routed the enemy and slew many. This is 
the first bloodstain, clear and bright, on our 
Taorminian land. Shall I add, from the few 
relics of that age, that Pythagoras, on the jour- 
ney he undertook to establish the governments 
of the Sicilian cities, wrought miracles here, 
curing a mad lover of his frenzy by music, and 
being present on this hill and at Metaponto the 



28 HEART OF MAN 

same day — a thing not to be done without 
magic ? But at last we see plainly Alcibiades 
coasting along below, and the ill-fated Athe- 
nians wintering in the port, and horsemen go- 
ing out from Naxos toward Etna on the side of 
Athens in the death-struggle of her glory. 
And then, suddenly, after the second three 
hundred years, all is over, the Greek city be- 
trayed, sacked, destroyed, Naxos trodden out 
under the foot of Dionysius the tyrant. 

Other fortune awaited him a few years later 
when he came again, and our city (which, one 
knows not when, had been walled and fortified) 
stood its first historic siege. Dionysius arrived 
in the dead of winter. Snow and ice — I 
can hardly credit it — whitened and roughened 
these ravines, a new ally to the besieged ; but 
the tyrant thought to betray them by a false 
security in such a season. On a bitter night, 
when clouds hooded the hilltop, and mists 
rolled low about its flanks, he climbed unob- 
served, with his forces, up these precipices, and 
gained two outer forts which gave footways to 
the walls ; but the town roused at the sound 
of arms and the cries of the guards, and came 
down to the fray, and fought until six hundred 



TAORMINA 29 

of the foe fell dead, others with wounds sur- 
rendered, and the rest fled headlong, with 
Dionysius among them, hard pressed, and 
staining the snow with his blood as he went. 
This was the city's first triumph. 

Not only with brave deeds did Taormina 
begin, but, as a city should, with a great man. 
He was really great, this Andromachus. Do 
you not remember him out of Plutarch, and 
the noble words that have been his immortal 
memory among men ? " This man was incom- 
parably the best of all those that bore sway in 
Sicily at that time, governing his citizens accord- 
ing to law and justice, and openly professing 
an aversion and enmity to all tyrants." Was 
the defeat of Dionysius the first of his youthful 
exploits, as some say ? I cannot determine ; 
but it is certain that he gathered the surviving 
exiles of Naxos, and gave them this plateau to 
dwell upon, and it was no longer called Mount 
Taurus, as had been the wont, but Tauromen- 
ium, or the Abiding-place of the Bull. A few 
years later Andromachus performed the signal 
action of his life by befriending Timoleon, as 
great a character, in my eyes, as Plutarch re- 
cords the glory of. Timoleon had set out 



30 HEART OF MAN 

from Corinth, at the summons of his Greek 
countrymen, to restore the liberty of Syracuse, 
then tyrannized over by the second Dionysius ; 
and because Andromachus, in his stronghold 
of Taormina, hated tyranny, Plutarch says, he 
" gave Timoleon leave to muster up his troops 
there and to make that city the seat of war, 
persuading the inhabitants to join their arms 
with the Corinthian forces and to assist them 
in the design of delivering Sicily." It was on 
our beach that Timoleon disembarked, and 
from our city he went forth to the conquest 
foretold by the wreath that fell upon his head 
as he prayed at Delphi, and by the prophetic 
fire that piloted his ship over the sea. The 
Carthaginians came quickly after him from 
Reggio, Avhere he had eluded them, for they 
were in alliance with the tyrant ; and from 
their vessels they parleyed with Andromachus 
in the port. With an insolent gesture, the 
envoy, raising his hand, palm up, and turning 
it lightly over, said that even so, and with such 
ease, would he overturn the little city ; and 
Andromachus, mocking his hand-play, answered 
that if he did not leave the harbour, even so 
would he upset his galley. The Carthaginians 



TAORMINA 31 

sailed away. The city remained firm-perched. 
Timoleon prospered, brought back liberty to 
Syracuse, ruled wisely and nobly, and gave to 
Sicily those twenty years of peace which were 
the flower of her Greek annals. Then, we 
must believe, rose the little temple on our 
headland, the Greek theatre where the tongue 
of Athens lived, the gymnasium where the 
youths grew fair and strong. Then Taormina 
struck her coins : Apollo with the laurel, with 
the lyre, with the grape ; Dionysus with the 
ivy, and Zeus with the olive ; for the gods and 
temples of the Naxians had become ours, and 
were religiously cherished ; and with the rest 
was struck a coin with the Minotaur, our 
symbol. But of Andromachus, the founder of 
the well-built and fairly adorned Greek city that 
then rose, we hear no more — a hero, I think, 
one of the true breed of the founders of states. 
But alas for liberty ! A new tyrant, Agatho- 
cles, was soon on the Syracusan throne, and he 
won this city by friendly professions, only to 
empty it by treachery and murder ; and he 
drove into exile Timaeus, the son of Androm- 
achus. Timaeus ? He, evidently, of my Casa 
Timeo. I know him now, the once famed his- 



32 HEABT OF MAN 

torian whom Cicero praises as the most erudite 
in history of all writers up to his time, most co- 
pious in facts and various in comment, not un- 
polished in style, eloquent, and distinguished 
by terse and charming expression. Ninety 
years he lived in the Greek world, devoted 
himself to history, and produced many works, 
now lost. The ancient writers read him, and 
from their criticism it is clear that he was 
marked by a talent for invective, was given to 
sharp censure, and loved the bitter part of 
truth. He introduced precision and detail into 
his art, and is credited with being the first to 
realize the importance of chronology and to 
seek exactness in it. He never saw again his 
lovely birthplace, and I easily forgive to the 
exile and the son of Andromachus the vigour 
with which he depicted the crimes of Agatho- 
cles and others of the tyrants. In our city, 
meanwhile, the Greek genius waning to its ex- 
tinction, Tyndarion ruled ; and in his time 
Pyrrhus came hither to repulse the ever 
invading power of Carthage. But he was little 
more than a shedder of blood ; he accomplished 
nothing, and I name him only as one of the 
figures of our beach. 



TAORMINA 33 

The day of Greece was gone ; but those two 
clouds of war still hung on the horizon, north 
and south, with ever darker tempest. Instead 
of Syracuse and Messina, Carthage and the 
new name of Rome now sent them forth, and 
over this island they encountered. Our city, 
true to its ancient tradition, became Rome's 
ever faithful ally, as you may read in the poem 
of Silius Italicus, and was dignified by treaty 
with the title of a confederate city ; and of this 
fact Cicero reminded the judges when in that 
famous trial he thundered against Verres, the 
spoiler of our Sicilian province, and with the 
other cities defended this of ours, whose people 
had signalized their hatred of the Roman 
prsotor by overthrowing his statue in the mar- 
ket-place and sparing the pedestal, as they said, 
to be an eternal memorial of his infamy. From 
the Roman age, however, I take but two epi- 
sodes, for I find that to write this town's his- 
tory were to write the history of half the 
Mediterranean world. When the slaves rose 
in the Servile War, they intrenched themselves 
on this hill, and in their hands the city bore its 
siege by the Roman consul as hardily as was 
ever its custom. Cruel they were, no doubt. 



34 HEART OF MAN 

and vindictive. With horror Monsignore re- 
lates that they were so resolved not to yield 
that, starving, they ate their children, their 
wives, and one another ; and he rejoices when 
they were at last betrayed and massacred, and 
this disgrace was wiped away. I hesitate. I 
cannot feel regret when those whom man has 
made brutal answer brutally to their oppressors. 
I have enough of the old Taorminian spirit 
to remember that the slaves, too, fought for 
libert3^ I am sorry for those penned and 
dying men ; their famine and slaughter in 
these walls were least horrible for their part in 
the catastrophe, if one looks through what they 
did to what they were, and remembers that the 
civilization they violated had stripped them of 
humanity. After the slave, I make room — for 
whom else than imperial Augustus ? Off this 
shore he defeated Sextus Pompey, and he 
thought easily to subdue the town above when 
he summoned it. But Taormina was always a 
loyal little place, and it would not yield without 
a siege. Then Augustus, sitting down before 
it, prayed in our temple of Guiding Apollo that 
he might have the victory ; and as he walked 
by the beach afterward a fish threw itself out 



TAORMINA 36 

of the water before him — an omen, said the 
diviners, that even so the Pompeians, who held 
the seas, after many turns of varied fortune, 
should be brought to his feet. Pompey re- 
turned with a fleet, and in these waters again 
the battle was fought and Augustus lost it, 
and the siege was raised. But when a third 
time the trial of naval strength was essayed, and 
the cause of the Pompeians ruined, Augustus 
remembered the city that had defied him, sent 
its inhabitants into exile, and planted a Roman 
colony in its place. Latin was now the lan- 
guage here. The massive grandeur of Roman 
architecture replaced the old Greek structures. 
The amphitheatre was enlarged and renewed in 
its present form, villas of luxury bordered the 
coasts as in Campania, and coins were struck in 
the Augustan name. 

The Roman domination in its turn slowly 
moved to its fall; and where should the new 
age begin more fitly than in this city of begin- 
nings ? As of old the Greek torch first gleamed 
here, here first on Sicilian soil was the Cross 
planted. The gods of Olympus had many tem- 
ples about the hill slopes, shrines of venerable 
antiquity even in those days ; but if the monk- 



36 HEART OP MAN 

ish chronicles be credited, the new faith sig- 
nalized its victory rather over three strange 
idolatries, — the worship of Falcone, of Lissone, 
and of Scamandro, a goddess. I refuse to be- 
lieve that the citizens were accustomed to sac- 
rifice three youths annually to Falcone ; and as 
for the other two deities, little is known of them 
except that their destruction marked the ad- 
vent of the young religion. Pancrazio was the 
name of him who was destined to be our patron 
saint through the coming centuries. He was 
born in Antioch, and when a child of three 
years, going with his father into Judaea, he had 
seen the living Christ ; now, grown into man- 
hood, he was sent by St. Peter to spread the 
gospel in the isles of the sea. He disem- 
barked on our beach, and forthwith threw Lis- 
sone's image into the waves, and with it a holy 
dragon which was coiled about it like a gar- 
ment and was fed with sacrifices ; and he shat- 
tered with his cross the great idol Scamandro : 
and so Taormina became Christian, welcomed 
St. Peter on his way to Rome, and entered 
on the long new age. It was here, as else- 
where, the age of martyrs — Pancrazio first, 
and after him Geminiano, guided hither with 



TAORMINA 37 

his mother by an angel ; and then San Nicone, 
who suffered with his one hundred and ninety- 
nine brother monks, and Sepero and Corneliano 
with their sixty; the age of monks — Luca, 
who fled from his bridal to live on Etna, with 
fasts, visions, and prophecies ; and, later, sim- 
ple-minded Daniele, the follower of St. Elia, 
of whom there is more to be recorded ; the 
age of bishops, heard in Roman councils and 
the palace of Byzantium, of whom two only 
are of singular interest — Zaccaria, who was 
deprived, evidently the ablest in mind and pol- 
icy of all the succession, once a great figure in 
the disputes of East and West ; and Procopio, 
whom the Saracens slew, for the Crescent now 
followed the Cross. 

The ancient war-cloud had again gathered 
out of Africa. The Saracens were in the land, 
and every city had fallen except Syracuse and 
Taormina. For sixty years the former held 
out, and our city for yet another thirty, the 
sole refuge of the Christians. Signs of the 
impending destruction were first seen by that 
St. Elia already mentioned, who wandered 
hither, and was displeased by the manners and 
morals of the citizens. I am sorry to record 



38 HEART OF MAN 

that Monsignore believed his report, for only 
here is there mention of such a matter. '' The 
citizens," says my author, " lived in luxury and 
pleasure not becoming to a state of war. They 
saw on all sides the fields devastated, houses 
burnt, wealth plundered, cities given to the 
flames, friends and companions killed or re- 
duced to slavery, yet was there no vice, no sin, 
that did not rule unpunished among them." 
Therefore the saint preached the woe to come, 
and, turning to the governor, Constantine Pa- 
trizio, in his place in the cathedral, he appealed 
to him to restrain his people. " Let the philos- 
ophy of the Gentiles," he exclaimed, " be your 
shame. Epaminondas, that illustrious condot- 
tiere^ strictly restrained himself from intem- 
perance, from every lust, every allurement of 
pleasure. So, also, Scipio, the Roman leader, 
was valorous through the same continence as 
Epaminondas ; and therefore they brought back 
signal victory, one over the Spartans, the other 
over the Carthaginians, and both erected im- 
mortal trophies." He promised them mercy 
with repentance, but ended threateningly: "So 
far as in me lies I have clearly foretold to you 
all that has been divinely revealed to me. If 



TAORMINA 39 

you believe my words, like the penitents of 
Nineveh, you shall find mercy ; if you despise 
my admonitions, bound and captive you shall 
be reduced to the worst slavery." He prophe- 
sied yet more in private. He went to the house 
of a noble citizen, Crisione, who esteemed him 
as a father, and, lying in bed, he said to him : 
" Do you see, Crisione, the bed in which I 
now lie ? In this same bed shall Ibrahim sleep, 
hungry for human blood, and the walls of the 
rooms shall see many of the most distinguished 
persons of this city all together put to the edge 
of the sword." Then he left the house and 
went to the square in the centre of the city, 
and, standing there, he lifted his garments 
above the knee. Whereupon simple Daniele, 
who always followed him about, marvelling 
asked, " What does this thing mean, father ? " 
The old man had his answer ready, ''Now 1 
see rivers of blood running, and these proud 
and magnificent buildings which you see ex- 
alted shall be destroyed even to the founda- 
tions by the Saracens." And the monk fled 
from the doomed city, like a true prophet, and 
went overseas. 

The danger was near, but perhaps not more 



40 HEART OF MAN 

felt than it must always have been where the 
prayer for defence against the Saracens had 
gone up for a hundred years in the cathedral. 
The governor, however, had taken pains to add 
to the strength of the city by strong fortifica- 
tions upon Mola. Ahulabras came under the 
walls, but gave over the ever unsuccessful at- 
tempt to take the place, and went on to ruin 
Reggio beyond the straits. When it was told 
to his father Ibrahim that Tabermina, as the 
Saracens called it, had again been passed by, 
he cried out upon his son, " He is degenerate, 
degenerate ! He took his nature from his mother 
and not from his father ; for, had he been born 
from me, surely his sword would not have spared 
the Christians ! " Therefore he recalled him 
to the home government, and came himself and 
sat down before the city. The garrison was 
small and insufficient, but, says my author, fol- 
lowing old chronicles, "youths, old men, and 
children, without distinction of age, sex, or con- 
dition, fearing outrage and all that slavery would 
expose them to, all spontaneously offered them- 
selves to fight in this holy war even to death : 
with such courage did love of country and re- 
ligious zeal inspire the citizens." Ibrahim had 



TAORMINA 41 

other weapons than the sword. He first cor- 
rupted the captains of the Greek fleet, who were 
afterward condemned for the treason at By- 
zantium. Then, all being ready, he promised 
some Ethiopians of his army, who are described 
as of a ferocious nature and harsh aspect, that 
he would give them the city for booty, besides 
other gifts, if they would devote themselves to 
the bold undertaking. The catastrophe de- 
serves to be told in Monsignore's own words : 

" This people, accustomed to rapine, allured by 
the riches of the Taorminians and the promises 
of the king, with the aid of the traitors entered 
unexpectedly into the city, and with bloody 
swords and mighty cries and clamour assailed 
the citizens. Meanwhile King Ibrahim, having 
entered with all his army by a secret gate under 
the fortress of Mola, thence called the gate of 
the Saracens, raged against the citizens with 
such unexpected and cruel slaughter that not 
only neither the weakness of sex, nor tender 
years, nor reverence for hoary age, but not even 
the abundance of blood that like torrents flowed 
down the ways, touched to pity that ferocious 
heart. The soldiers, masters of the beautiful 



42 HEART OF MAN 

and wealthy city, divided among them the riches 
and goods of the citizens according as to each 
one the lot fell ; they levelled to the ground the 
magnificent buildings, public or private, sac:red 
or profane, all that were proudest for ampli- 
tude, construction, and ornament ; and that 
not even the ruins of ancient splendour should 
remain, all that had survived they gave to the 
flames." 

This city, which the Saracens destroyed, is 
the one the Taorminians cherish as the cul- 
mination of their past. In the Greek, the 
Roman, and the early Christian ages it had 
flourished, as both its ruins and its history 
attest, and much must have yet survived from 
those times ; while its station as the only 
Christian stronghold in the island would 
naturally have attracted wealth hither for 
safety. In this first sack of the Saracens, 
the ancient city must have perished, but the 
destruction could hardly have been so thorough 
as is represented, since some of the churches 
themselves, in their present state, show Byzan- 
tine workmanship. 

There remains one bloody and characteristic 



TAOEMINA 43 

episode to Ibrahim's victory. Tlie king, says 
the Arab chronicler, was pious and naturally 
compassionate, but on this occasion he forgot 
his usual mildness. In the midst of fire and 
blood he ordered the soldiers to search the 
caverns of the hills, and they dragged forth 
many prisoners, among whom was the Bishop 
Procopio. The king spoke to him gently and 
nobly, " Because you are wise and old, O Bishop, 
I exhort you with soft words to obey my advice, 
and to have foresight for your own safety and 
that of your companions ; otherwise you shall 
suffer what your fellow-citizens have suffered 
from me. If you will embrace my laws, and 
deny the Christian religion, you shall have the 
second place after me, and shall be more dear 
to me than all the Agarenes." The prelate 
only smiled. Then, full of wrath, the king 
said : " Do you smile while you are my pris- 
oner? Know you not in whose presence you 
are ? " "I smile truly," came the answer, 
''because I see you are inspired by a demon 
who puts these words into your mouth." 
Furious, the king called to his attendants, 
" Quick, break open his breast, tear out his 
heart, that we may see and understand the 



44 HEART OF MAN 

secrets of his mind." While the command 
was being executed, Procopio reproved the 
king and comforted his companions. " The 
tyrant, swollen with rage, and grinding ys 
teeth," says the narrative, "barbarously of- 
fered him the torn-out heart that he might eat 
it." Then he bade them strike off the bishop's 
head (who, we are told, was already half dead), 
and also the heads of his companions, and to 
burn the bodies all together. And as St. Pan- 
crazio of old had thrown the holy dragon into 
the sea, so now were his own ashes scattered to 
the winds of heaven ; and Ibrahim, having ac- 
complished his work, departed. 

Some of the citizens, however, had survived, 
and among them Crisione, the host of St. Elia. 
He went to bear the tidings to the saint ; and 
being now assured of the gift of prophecy pos- 
sessed by the holy man, asked him to foretell 
his future. He met the customary fate of the 
curious in such things. " I foresee," said the 
discomfortable saint, "that within a few days 
you will die." And to make an end of St. Elia 
with Crisione, let me record here the simple 
Daniele's last act of piety to his master. It is 
little that in such company he fought with 



TAORMINA 45 

devils, or that after he had written with much 
labour a beautiful Psalter, the old monk bade 
him fling it and worldly pride together over the 
cliff into a lake. Such episodes belonged to 
the times; and, after all, by making a circuit 
of six miles he found the Psalter miraculously 
unwet, and only his worldly pride remained at 
the lake's bottom. But it was a mind singu- 
larly inventive of penance that led the dying 
saint to charge poor Daniele to bear the corpse 
on his back a long way over the mountains, 
merely because, he said, it would be a difficult 
thing to do. Other survivors of the sack 
of Taormina, more fortunate than Crisione, 
watched their opportunity, and, at a moment 
when the garrison was weak, entered, seized the 
place, fortified it anew, and offered it to the 
Greek emperor once more. He could not 
maintain war with the Saracens, but by a 
treaty made with them he secured his faithful 
Taorminians in the possession of the city. 
After forty years of peace under this treaty it 
was again besieged for several months, and fell 
on Christmas night. Seventeen hundred and 
fifty of its citizens were sent by the victors into 
slavery in Africa. Greek troops, however, soon 



46 HEART OF MAN 

retook the city in a campaign that opened brill- 
iantly in Sicily only to close in swift disaster ; 
but for five years longer Taormina sustained 
continual siege, and when it fell at last, with 
the usual carnage of its citizens and the now 
thrice-repeated fire and ruin of Saracenic vic- 
tory, we may well believe that, though it re- 
mained the seat of a governor, little of the 
city was left except its memory. Its name 
even was changed to Moezzia. 

The Crescent ruled undisturbed for a hun- 
dred years, until the landing of Count Roger, 
the Norman, the great hero of mediaeval Sicily, 
who recovered the island to the Christian faith. 
Taormina, true to its tradition, was long in 
falling ; but after eighteen years of desultory 
warfare Count Roger sat down before it with 
determination. He surrounded it with a cir- 
cumvallation of twenty-two fortresses con- 
nected by ramparts and bridges, and cut off 
all access by land or sea. Each day he in- 
spected the lines ; and the enemy, having no- 
ticed this habit, laid an ambush for him in 
some young myrtles where the path he fol- 
lowed had a very narrow passage over the 
precipices. They rushed out on him, and, as 



TAOKMINA 47 

he was unarmed and alone, would have killed 
him, had not their cries attracted one Evandro, 
a Breton, who, coming, and seeing his chief's 
peril, threw himself between, and died in his 
place. Count Roger was not forgetful of this 
noble action. He recovered the body, held 
great funeral services, and gave gifts to the 
soldiers and the church. The story appealed 
so to the old chronicler Malaterra, that he 
told it in both prose and verse. After seven 
months the city surrended, and the iron cross 
was again set up on the rocky eminence by the 
gate. It is a sign of the ruin which had be- 
fallen that the city now lost its bishopric and 
was ecclesiastically annexed to another see. 

Taormina, compared with what it had been, 
was now a place of the desert ; but not the less 
for that did the tide of war rage round it for 
five hundred years to come. It was like a rock 
of the sea over which conflicting billows break 
eternally. I will not narrate the feudal story 
of internecine violence, nor how amidst it all 
every religious order set up monasteries upon 
the beautiful hillsides, of whose life little is 
now left but the piles of books in old bindings 
over which my friend the librarian keeps guard, 



48 HEAKT OF MAN 

mourning the neglect in which they are left. 
Among both the nobles and the fathers were 
some examples of heroism, sacrifice, and learn- 
ing, but their deeds and virtues may sleep 
unwaked by me. The kings and queens who 
took refuge here, and fled again, Messenian 
foray and Chiaramontane faction, shall go un- 
recorded. I must not, however, in the long 
roll of the famous figures of our beach forget 
that our English Richard the Lion-hearted was 
entertained here by Tancred in crusading days; 
and of notable sieges let me name at least that 
which the city suffered for its loyalty to the 
brave and generous Manfred when the Mes- 
senians surprised and wasted it, and that which 
with less destruction the enemies of the second 
Frederick inflicted on it, and that of the French 
under Charles II., who, contrary to his word, 
gave up the surrendered city to the soldiery for 
eight whole days — a terrible sack, of which 
Monsignore has heard old men tell. What 
part the citizens took in the Sicilian Vespers, 
and how the Parliament that vainly sought a 
king for all Sicily was held here, and in later 
times the marches of the Germans, Spaniards, 
and English — these were too long a tale. 



TAORMINA 49 

With one more signal memory I close this 
world-history, as it began, with a noble name. 
It was from our beach yonder that Garibaldi 
set out for Italy in the campaign of Aspro- 
monte ; hither he was brought back, wounded, 
to the friendly people, still faithful to that love 
of liberty which flowed in the old Taorminian 
blood. 

I shut my books ; but to my eyes the rock 
is scriptured now. What a leaf it is from the 
world-history of man upon the planet ! Every 
race has splashed it with blood ; every faith 
has cried from it to heaven. It is only a hill- 
station in the realm of empire ; but in the 
records of such a city, lying somewhat aside 
and out of common vision, the course of human 
fate may be more simply impressive than in 
the story of world-cities. Athens, Rome, Con- 
stantinople, London, Paris, are great centres of 
history ; but in them the mind is confused by 
the multiplicity and awed by the majesty of 
events. Here on this bare rock there is no 
thronging of illustrious names, and little of 
that glory that conceals imperial crime, the 
massacre of armies, and the people's woe. 
Again I use the figure : it is like a rock of 



50 HEART OF MAN 

the sea, set here in the midst of the Mediter- 
ranean world, washed by all the tides of his- 
tory, beat on by every pitiless storm of the 
passion of man for blood. The torch of Greeqe, 
the light of the Cross, the streaming portent of 
the Crescent, have shone from it, each in its 
time ; all governments, from Greek democracy 
to Bourbon tyranny, have ruled it in turn ; 
Roman law and feudal custom had it in charge, 
each a long age : yet civilization in all its his- 
toric forms has never here done more, seem- 
ingly, than alleviate at moments the hard 
human lot. And what has been the end ? Go 
down into the streets ; go out into the vil- 
lages ; go into the country-side. The men 
will hardly look up from their burdens, the 
women will seldom stop to ask alms, but you 
will see a degradation of the human form that 
speaks not of the want of individuals, of one 
generation, or of an age, but of the destitution 
of centuries stamped physically into the race. 
There is, as always, a prosperous class, men 
well to do, the more fortunate and better-born ; 
but the common people lead toilsome lives, and 
among them suffering is widespread. Three 
thousand years of human life, and this the 



TAORMINA 61 

result ! Yet I see many indications of a brave 
patriotism in the community, an effort to im- 
prove general conditions, to arouse, to stimu- 
late, to encourage — the spirit of free and 
united Italy awakening here, too, with faith 
in the new age of liberty and hope of its 
promised blessings. And for a sign there 
stands in the centre of the poor fishing-village 
yonder a statue of Garibaldi. 

VI 

The rain-cloud is gone. The days are bright, 
warm, and clear, and every hour tempts me 
forth to wander about the hills. It is not 
spring, but the hesitancy that holds before the 
season changes; yet each day there are new 
flowers — not our delicate wood flowers, but 
larger and coarser of fibre, and it adds a charm 
to them that I do not know their names. The 
trees are budding, and here and there, like a 
wave breaking into foam on a windless sea, 
an almond has burst into blossom, white and 
solitary on the gray slopes, and over all the 
orchards there is the faint suggestion of pale 
pink, felt more than seen, so vague is it — 



62 HEART OF MAN 

but it is there. I go wandering by cliff or 
sea-shore, by rocky beds of running water, 
under dark-browed caverns, and on high crags ; 
now on our cape, among the majestic rocks, I 
watch the swaying of the smooth deep-violet 
waters below, changing into indigo as they 
lap the rough clefts, or I loiter on the beach 
to see the fishers about their boats, weather- 
worn mariners, and youths in the fair strength 
of manly beauty, like athletes of the old world: 
and always I bring back something for memory, 
something unforeseen. 

I have ever found this uncertainty a rare 
pleasure of travel. It is blessed not to know 
what the gods will give. I remember once in 
other days I left the beach of Amalfi to row 
away to the isles of the Sirens, farther down 
the coast. It was a beautiful, blowing, wave- 
wild morning, and I strained my sight, as every 
headland of the high cliff-coast was rounded, to 
catch the first glimpse of the low isles ; and 
there came by a country boat-load of the peas- 
ants, and in the bows, as it neared and passed, 
I saw a dark, black-haired boy, bare breast, and 
dreaming eyes, motionless save for the dipping 
prow — a figure out of old Italian pictures, 



TAOKMINA 5S 

some young St. John, inexpressibly beautiful. 
I have forgotten how the isles of the Sirens 
looked, but that boy's face I shall never forget. 
It is such moments that give the Italy of the 
imagination its charm. Here, too, I have simi- 
lar experiences. A day or two ago, when the 
bright weather began, I was threading the rough 
edge of a broken path under the hill, and cling- 
ing to the rock with my hand. Suddenly a 
figure rose just before me, where the land made 
out a little farther on a point of the crag, so 
strange that I was startled ; but straightway I 
knew the goatherd, the curling locks, the olive 
face, the garments of goatskin and leather on 
his limbs. It came on me like a flash ^ — eccola 
the country of Theocritus ! 

I have never seen it set down among the ad- 
vantages of travel that one learns to understand 
the poets better. To see courts and govern- 
ments, manners and customs, works of archi- 
tecture, statues and pictures and ruins — this, 
since modern travel began, is to make the grand 
tour ; but though I have diligently sought such 
obvious and common aims, and had my reward, 
I think no gain so great as that I never thought 
of, the light which travel sheds upon the poets ; 



54 HEART OF MAN 

unless, indeed, I should except that stronger 
hold on the reality of the ideal creations of the 
imagination which comes from familiar life with 
pictures, and statues, and kindred physical ren- 
derings of art. This latter advantage must 
necessarily be more narrowly availed of by 
men, since it implies a certain peculiar tem- 
perament ; but poetry, in its less exalted forms, 
is open and common to all who are not im- 
mersed in the materialism of their own lives, 
and whatever helps to unlock the poetic treas- 
ures of other lands for our possession may be 
an important part of life. I think none can 
fully taste the sweetness, or behold the beauty, 
of English song even, until he has wandered 
in the lanes and fields of the mother-country ; 
and in the case of foreign, and especially of the 
ancient, poets, so much of whose accepted and 
assumed world of fact has perished, the loss is 
very great. I had trodden many an Italian 
hillside before I noticed how subtly Dante's 
landscape had become realized in my mind as 
a part of nature. I own to believing that 
Virgil's storms never blew on the sea until 
once, near Salerno, as I rode back from Pses- 
tum, there came a storm over the wide gulf 



TAORMINA 66 

that held my eyes enchanted — snch masses of 
ragged, full clouds, such darkness in their 
broad bosoms broken with rapid flame, and a 
change beneath so swift, such anger on the 
sea, such an indescribable and awful gleaming 
hue, not purple, nor green, nor red, but a 
commingling of all these — a revelation of the 
wrath of colour ! The waves were wild with 
the fallen tempest; quick and heavy the surf 
came thundering on the sands ; the light went 
out as if it were extinguished, and the dark 
rain came down ; and I said, '' 'Tis one of 
Virgil's storms." Such a one you will find 
also in Theocritus, where he hymns the chil- 
dren of Leda, succourers of the ships that, 
'' defying the stars that set and rise in heaven, 
have encountered the perilous breath of storms. 
The winds raise huge billows about their stern, 
yea, or from the prow, or even as each wind 
wills, and cast them into the hold of the ship, 
and shatter both bulwarks, while with the sail 
hangs all the gear confused and broken, and 
the wide sea rings, being lashed by the gusts 
and by showers of iron hail." 

I must leave these older memories, to tell, 
so far as it is possible in words, of that land 



66 HEART OF MAN 

of the idyl which of all enchanted retreats of 
the imagination is the hardest for him without 
the secret to enter. Yet here I find it all 
about me in the places where the poets first 
unveiled it. Once before I had a sight of it, 
as all over Italy it glimpses at times from the 
hills and the campagna. Descending under 
the high peak of Capri, I heard a flute, and 
turned and saw on the neighbouring slopes 
the shepherd-boy leading his flock, the music 
at his lips. Then the centuries rolled together 
like a scroll, and I heard the world's morning 
notes. That was a single moment; but here, 
day-long is the idyl world. I read the old 
verses over, and in my walks the song keeps 
breaking in. The idyls are full of streams 
and fountains, just such as I meet with wher- 
ever I turn, and the water counts in the land- 
scape as in the poems. It is always tumbling 
over rocks in cascades, brawling with rounded 
forms among the stones of the shallow brooks, 
bubbling in fountains, or dripping from the 
cliff, or shining like silver in the plain. The 
run that comes down from Mola, the torrent 
under the olive and lemon branches toward 
Letojanni, the more open course in the ra- 



TAORMINA 67 

vine of the mill down by Giardini, the cimeter 
of the far-seen Alcantara lying on the cam- 
pagna in the meadows, and that further jiume 
freddo^ the cold stream, — " chill water that 
for me deep-wooded Etna sends down from the 
white snow, a draught divine," — each of these 
seems inhabited by a genius of its own, so that 
it does not resemble its neighbours. But all 
alike murmur of ancient song, and bring it 
near, and make it real. 

On the beach one feels most keenly the ac- 
tuality of much of the idyls, and finds the con- 
tinuousness of the human life that enters into 
them. No idyl appeals so directly to modern 
feeling, I suspect, as does that of the two fisher- 
men and the dream of the golden fish. Go 
down to the shore ; you will find the old men 
still at their toil, the same implements, the 
same poverty, the same sentiment for the heart. 
Often as I look at them I recall the old words, 
while the goats hang their heads over the scant 
herbage, and the blue sea breaks lazily and 
heavily on the sands. 

''Two fishers, on a time, two old men, to- 
gether lay and slept ; they had strewn the 



68 HEART OF MAN 

dry sea-moss for a bed in their wattled cabin, 
and there lay against the leafy wall. Beside 
them were strewn the instruments of their toil- 
some hands, the fishing-creels, the rods of reed, 
the hooks, the sails bedraggled with sea-spoil, 
the lines, the weels, the lobster-pots woven of 
rushes, the seines, two oars, and an old cobble 
upon props. Beneath their heads was a scanty 
matting, their clothes, their sailors' caps. Here 
was all their toil, here all their wealth. The 
threshold had never a door nor a watch-dog. 
All things, all, to them seemed superfluity, for 
Poverty was their sentinel ; they had no neigh- 
bour by them, but ever against their narrow 
cabin gently floated up the sea." 

This is what the eye beholds ; and I dare not 
say that the idyl is touched more with the mel- 
ancholy of human fate for us than for the poet. 
Poverty such as this, so absolute, I see every- 
where at every hour. It is a terrible sight. It 
is the physical hunger of the soul in wan limbs 
and hand, and the fixed gaze of the unhoping 
eyes — despair made flesh. How long has it suf- 
fered here ? and was it so when Theocritus saw 
his fishers and gave them a place in the country 



TAORMINA 59 

of his idyls ? He spreads before us the hills and 
fountains, and fills the scene with shepherds, 
and maidens, and laughing loves, and among 
the rest are these two poor old men. The 
shadow of the world's poverty falls on this 
paradise now as then. With the rock and sea 
it, too, endures. 

A few traces of the old myths also survive 
on the landscape. Not far from here, down the 
coast, the rocks that the Cyclops threw after 
the fleeing mariners are still to be seen near the 
shore above which he piped to Galatea. Some 
day I mean to take a boat and see them. But 
now I let the Cyclops idyls go, and with them 
Adonis of Egypt, and Ptolemy, and the prattling 
women, and the praises of Hiero, and the deeds 
of Herakles : these all belong to the cities of 
the pastoral, to its civilization and art in more 
conscious forms ; but my heart stays in the cam- 
pagna, where are the song-contests, the amor- 
ous praise of maidens, the boyish boasting, the 
young, sweet, graceful loves. Fain would I re- 
cover the breath of that springtime ; but while 
from my foot " every stone upon the way spins 
singing," make what speed I can, I come not 
to the harvest-feast. Bees go booming among 



60 HEART OF MAN 

the blossoms, and the flocks crop their pasture, 
and night falls with Hesperus ; but fruitless on 
my lips, as at some shrine whence the god is 
gone, is Bion's prayer : " Hesperus, golden 
lamp of the lovely daughter of the foam — dear 
Hesperus, sacred jewel of the deep blue night, 
dimmer as much than the moon as thou art 
among the stars preeminent, hail, friend ! " 
Dead now is that ritual. Now more silent than 
ever is the country-side, missing Daphnis, the 
flower of all those who sing when the heart is 
young. Sweet was his flute's first triumph 
over Menalcas : " Then was the boy glad, and 
leaped high, and clapped his hands over his 
victory, as a young fawn leaps about his 
mother " ; but sweeter was the unwon victory 
when he strove with Damoetas : " Then Da- 
moetas kissed Daphnis, as he ended his song, 
and he gave Daphnis a pipe, and Daphnis gave 
him a beautiful flute. Damcetas fluted, and 
Daphnis piped; the herdsmen, and anon the 
calves, were dancing in the soft green grass. 
Neither won the victory, but both were in- 
vincible." And him, too, I miss who loved 
his friend, and wished that they twain might 
^* become a song in the ears of all men un- 



TAOEMINA 61 

born," even for their love's sake ; and prayed, 
"Would, O Father Cronides, and would, ye 
ageless immortals, that this might be, and that 
when two generations have sped, one might 
bring these tidings to me by Acheron, the ir- 
remeable stream : the loving-kindness that was 
between thee and thy gracious friend is even 
now in all men's mouths, and chiefly on the 
lips of the young." Hill and fountain and 
pine, the gray sea and Mother Etna, are here ; 
but no children gather in the land, as once 
about the tomb of Diodes at the coming in 
of the spring, contending for the prize of the 
kisses — " Whoso most sweetly touches lip to 
lip, laden with garlands he returneth to his 
mother. Happy is he who judges those kisses 
of the children." Lost over the bright furrows 
of the sea is Europa riding on the back of the 
divine bull as Moschus beheld her — "With 
one hand she clasped the beast's great horn, 
and with the other caught up the purple fold 
of her garment, lest it might trail and be wet 
in the hoar sea's infinite spray"; and from 
the border-land of mythic story, that was then 
this world's horizon, yet more faintly the fading 
voice of Hylas answers the deep-throated shout 



62 HEART OF MAN 

of Herakles. Faint now as his voice are the 
voices of the shepherds who are gone, youth 
and maiden and children; dimly I see them, 
vaguely I hear them ; at last there remains 
only "the hoar sea's infinite spray." And will 
you say it was in truth all a dream ? Were 
the poor fishermen in their toil alone real, and 
the rest airy nothings to whom Sicily gave a 
local habitation and a name ? It was Virgil's 
dream and Spenser's; and some secret there 
was — something still in our breasts — that 
made it immortal, so that to name the Sicilian 
Muses is to stir an infinite, longing tenderness 
in every j^oung and noble heart that the gods 
have softened with sweet thoughts. 

And here I shut in my pages the one laurel 
leaf that Taormina bore. She, too, in her cen- 
turies has had her poet. Perhaps none who 
will see these words ever gave a thought to 
the name and fame of Cornelius Severus. Few 
of his works remain, and little is known of his 
life. He is said to have been the friend of Pol- 
lio, and to have been present in the Sicilian war 
between Augustus and Sextus Pompey. He 
wrote the first book of an epic poem on that 
subject, so excellent that it has been thought 



TAORMINA 63 

that, had the entire work been continued at the 
same level, he would have held the second 
place among the Latin epic poets. He wrote 
also heroic songs, of which fragments survive, 
one of which is an elegy upon Cicero, which 
Seneca quotes, saying of him, " No one out of 
so many talented men deplored the death of 
Cicero better than Cornelius Severus." Some 
dialogues in verse also seem to have been writ- 
ten by him. These fragments may not be easily 
obtained. But take down your Virgil ; and, if it 
be like this of mine which I brought from Rome, 
you will find at the very end, last of the shorter 
pieces ascribed to the poet, one of the length 
of a book of the ^'Georgics," called "Etna." 
This is the work of Cornelius Severus. An 
early death took from him the perfection of his 
genuis and the hope of fame ; but happy was 
the fortune of him who wrote so well that for 
centuries his lines were thought not unworthy 
of Virgil, whose name still shields this Taor- 
minian verse from oblivion. 

VII 

It is my last day at Taormina. I have seen 
the sunrise from my old station by the Greek 



64 HEART OF MAN 

temple, and watched the throng of cattle and 
men gathered on the distant beach of Letojanni 
and darkening the broad bed of the dry torrent 
that there makes down to the sea, and I wished 
I were among them, for it is their annual fair ; 
and still I dwell on every feature of the land- 
scape that familiarity has made more beautiful. 
The afternoon I have dedicated to a walk to 
Mola. It is a pleasant, easy climb, with the 
black ancient wall of the city on the left, where 
it goes up the face of the castle-rock, and on the 
right the deep ravine, closed by Monte Venere 
in the west. All is very quiet ; a silent, silent 
country ! There are few birds or none, and 
indeed I have heard no bird-song since I have 
been here. Opposite, on the other side of the 
wall of the ravine, are some cows hanging in 
strange fashion to the cliff, where it seems 
goats could hardly cling ; but the unwieldy, 
awkward creatures move with sure feet, and 
seem wholly at home, pasturing on the bare 
precipice. I cannot hear the torrent, now a 
narrow stream, deep below me, but I see the 
women of Mola washing by the old fountain 
which is its source. There is no other sign of 
human life. The fresh spring flowers, large and 



TAORMINA 65 

coarse, but bright-coloured, are all I have of 
company, and the sky is blue and the air like 
crystal. So I go up, ever up, and at last am 
by the gate of Mola, and enter the stony-hearted 
town. A place more dreary, desolate to the 
eye, is seldom seen. There are only low, mean 
houses of gray stone, and the paved ways. If 
you can fancy a prison turned inside out like a 
glove, with all its interior stone exposed to the 
sunlight, which yet seems sunlight in a prison, 
and silence over all — that is Mola. The ruins 
of the fortress are near the gate on the high- 
est point of the crag. Within is a barren spot 
— a cistern, old foundations, and some broken 
walls. Look over the battlement westward, 
and you will see a precipice that one thinks 
only birds could assail ; and, observing how 
isolated is the crag on all sides, you will under- 
stand what an inaccessible fastness this was, and 
cannot be surprised at its record of defence. 

Perhaps here was the oldest dwelling-place 
of man upon the hill, and it was the securest 
retreat. Monsignore, indeed, believes that Ham, 
the son of Noah, who drove Japhet out of Sicily, 
was the first builder ; but I do not doubt its 
antiquity was very great, and it seems likely 



66 HEART OF MAN 

that this was the original Siculian stronghold 
before the coming of the Greeks, and the build- 
ing of the lower city of Taormina. The ruins 
that exist are part of the fortress made by that 
governor who lost the city to the Saracens, to 
defend it against them on this side ; and here 
it stood for nigh a thousand years, like the 
citadel itself, an impregnable hold of war. It 
seldom yielded, and always by treachery or 
mutiny ; for more than once, when Taormina 
was sacked, its citadel and Mola remained 
untaken and unconquerable on their extreme 
heights. I shall not tell its story ; but one 
brave man once commanded here, and his name 
shall be its fame now, and my last tale of the 
Taorminian past. 

He was Count Matteo, a nobleman of the 
days when the Messenians revolted against the 
chancellor of Queen Margaret. He was placed 
over this castle ; and when a certain Count 
Riccardo was discovered in a conspiracy to 
murder the chancellor, and was taken captive, 
he was given into Matteo's charge, and impris- 
oned here. The Messenians came and surprised 
the lower city of Taormina, but they could not 
gain Mola nor persuade Matteo to yield Ric- 



TAORMINA 67 

cardo up to them. So they thought to over- 
come his fidelity cruelly. They took his wife 
and children, who were at Messina, threw them 
into a dungeon, and condemned them to death. 
Then they sent Matteo's brother-in-law to treat 
with him. But when the count knew the rea- 
son of the visit he said : " It seems to me that 
you little value the zeal of an honest man who, 
loyal to his office, does not wish, neither knows 
how, to break his sworn faith. My wife and 
children would look on me with scornful eyes 
should I be renegade ; for shame is not the re- 
ward that sweetens life, but burdens it. If 
the Messenians stain themselves with innocent 
blood, I shall weep for the death of my wife 
and sons, but the heart of an honest citizen 
will have no remorse." Then he was silent. 
But treachery could do what such threats failed 
to accomplish. One Gavaretto was found, who 
unlocked the prison, and Riccardo was already 
escaping when Matteo, roused at a slight noise, 
came, sword in hand, and would have slain him ; 
but the traitor behind, "to save his wages," 
struck Matteo in the body, and the faithful count 
fell dead in his blood. I thought of this story, 
standing there, and nothing else in the castle's 



68 HEART OF MAN 

legend seemed worthy of memory in compari- 
son, from its mystic beginning until that night, 
near two centuries ago, when the thunderbolt 
fell on it, igniting its store of powder, and blew 
it utterly to fragments with a great explosion. 
The castle of Taormina on the eastward 
height is easily reached by a ridge that runs 
toward it on the homeward track. Along the 
way are seen the caves so often mentioned in 
the records of the city as the refuge of the peo- 
ple in times of disaster. The castle itself, much 
larger and more important than Mola, is wholly 
in ruins. The walls stand, with some broken 
stairways, and a room or two, massive and 
desolate, remains. Of its history I have found 
no particular mention, but here must always 
have been the citadel. Once more from its 
open platform I gazed on the fair country it 
had guarded, while the snows of Etna began to 
be touched with sunset ; and as my hand lay 
on the ruined battlement, for which how many 
thousand died bloody deaths, again the long 
past rose from the rock. I saw the young 
Greeks raising Apollo's altar by the river-bank. 
I saw Dionysius in the winter night, staining 
the snow from the wound in his breast as he 



TAORMINA 69 

fled down the darkness, and the Norman sol- 
dier dying for Roger beneath the cimeters by 
the young myrtles. I saw the citizens in the 
market-place overthrowing Verres' statue, the 
monk Elia with his lifted garment, the bishop 
in his murder before Ibrahim. I wondered at 
the little port that was large enough to hold 
the fleets of Athens, of Carthage, and of Au- 
gustus, and at the strip of beach trodden by so 
many famous men on heroic enterprises. There 
the fishers were drawing up their boats, coming 
home at the day's close from that toil of the sea 
which has outlived gods and martyrs and em- 
pires. The snows of Etna were now aflame with 
sunset, and the high clouds trembled with swift 
and mighty radiance, and league after league 
the sea took on the pale rose-colour. Descend- 
ing, I passed through the dark cleft between 
the castle and the silent, deserted church of the 
hermitage by its side, and, in a moment, again 
the vision burst on me, and in its glow I went 
down the rock-face by the terraces under al- 
mond blossoms. Softly the sea changed through 
every tender colour, bathing beach and headland, 
and strange lights fell upon the crags from the 
mild heaven, and all the Taorminian land was 



70 HEART OF MAN 

filled with bloom ; then the infinite beauty, 
slowly fading, withdrew the scene, and sweetly 
it parted from my eyes. 

VIII 

Yet once more I step out upon the terrace 
into the night. I hear the long roar of the 
breakers ; I see the flickering fishers' lights, 
and Etna pale under the stars. The place is 
full of ghosts. In the darkness I seem to hear 
vaguely arising, half sense, half thought, the 
murmur of many tongues that have perished 
here, Sicanian and Siculian and the lost Oscan, 
Greek and Latin and the hoarse jargon of bar- 
baric slaves, Byzantine and Arabic confused 
with strange African dialects, Norman and 
Sicilian, French and Spanish, mingling, blend- 
ing, changing, the sharp battle-cry of a thou- 
sand assaults rising from the low ravines, the 
death-cry of twenty bloody massacres within 
these walls, ringing on the hard rock and fall- 
ing to silence only to rise more full with fiercer 
pain — century after century of the battle-wrath 
and the battle-woe. My fancy shapes the air 
till I see over the darkly lifted castle-rock the 



TAORMINA 71 

triple crossing swords of Greek, Carthaginian, 
and Roman in the age-long duel, and as these 
fade, the springing brands of Byzantine, Arab, 
and Norman, and yet again the heavy blades of 
France, Spain, and Sicily ; and ever, like rain 
or snow, falls the bloody dew on this lone hill- 
side. " Oh, wherefore ? " I whisper ; and all is 
silent save the surge still lifting round the 
coast the far voices of the old Ionian sea. I 
have wondered that the children of Etna should 
dwell in its lovely paradise, as I thought how 
often, how terribly, the lava has poured forth 
upon it, the shower of ashes fallen, the black 
horror of volcanic eruption overwhelmed the 
land. Yet, sum it all, pang by pang, all that 
Etna ever wrought of woe to the sons of men, 
the agonies of her burnings, the terrors of her 
living entombments, all her manifold deaths 
at once, and what were it in comparison with 
the blood that has flowed on this hillside, the 
slaughter, the murder, the infinite pain here 
suffered at the hands of man. O Etna, it is 
not thou that man should fear I He should 
fear his brother-man. 



72 HEART OF MAN 



IX 



The stars were paling over Etna, white and 
ghostly, as I came out to depart. In the dark 
street I met a woman with a young boy cling- 
ing to her side. Her black hair fell down 
over her shoulders, and her bosom was scantily 
clothed by the poor garment that fell to her 
ankles and her feet. She was still young, and 
from her dark, sad face her eyes met mine with 
that fixed look of the hopeless poor, now grown 
familiar ; the child, half naked, gazed up at me 
as he held his mother's hand. What brought 
her there at that hour, alone with her child ? 
She seemed the epitome of the human life I 
was leaving behind, come forth to bid farewell ; 
and she passed on under the shadows of the 
dawn. The last star faded as I went down 
the hollow between the spurs. Etna gleamed 
white and vast over the shoulder of the ravine, 
and, as I dipped down, was gone. 



A NEW DEFENCE OP POETRY 



A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 

There was an old cry^ Return to Nature ! 
Let us rather return unto the soul. Nature is 
great, and her science marvellous; but it is man 
who knows it. In what he knows it is partial 
and subsidiary. Know thyself, was the first 
command of reason ; and wisdom was an ancient 
thing when the sweet influences of the Pleiades 
and the path of Arcturus with his sons were 
young in human thought. These late con- 
quests of the mind in the material infinities of 
the universe, its exploring of stellar space, its 
exhuming of secular time, its harnessing of in- 
visible forces, this new mortal knowledge, its 
sudden burst, its brilliancy and amplitude of 
achievement, thought winnowing the world 
as with a fan ; the vivid spectacle of vast and 
beneficent changes wrought by this means 
in human welfare, the sense of the increase of 
man's power springing from unsuspected and 
illimitable resources, — all this has made us 

76 



76 HEART OF MAN 

forgetful of truth that is the oldest heirloom of 
the race. In the balances of thought the soul 
of man outweighs the mass that gravitation 
measures. Man only is of prime interest to 
men ; and man as a spirit, a creature but made 
in the likeness of something divine. The lapse 
of aeons touches us as little as the reach of 
space, even the building of our planet, and 
man's infancy, have the faint and distant reality 
of cradle records. Science may reconstruct the 
inchoate body of animal man, the clay of our 
mould, and piece together the primitive skeleton 
of the physical being we now wear; but the 
mind steadily refuses to recognize a human past 
without some discipline in the arts, some exer- 
cise in rude virtue, and some proverbial lore 
handed down from sire to son. The tree of 
knowledge is of equal date with the tree of life; 
nor were even the tamer of horses, the worker 
in metals, or the sower, elder than those twin 
guardians of the soul, — the poet and the priest. 
Conscience and imagination were the pioneers 
who made earth habitable for the human spirit; 
they are still its lawgivers; and where they 
have lodged their treasures, there is wisdom. 
I desire to renew the long discussion of the 



A NEW DEFENCE OF POETKY 77 

nature and method of idealism by engaging in 
a new defence of poetry, or the imaginative art 
in any of its kinds, as the means by which this 
wisdom, which is the soul's knowledge of itself, 
is stored up for the race in its most manifest, 
enduring, and vital forms. It is, by literary 
tradition and association, a proud task. May 
I not take counsel of Spenser and be bold at 
the first door? Sidney and Shelley pleaded 
this cause. Because they spoke, must we be 
dumb ? or shall not a noble example be put to 
its best use in trying what truth can now do 
on younger lips? The old hunt is up in the 
Muses' bower ; and I would fain speak for that 
learning which has to me been light. I use 
this preface not unwillingly in open loyalty to 
studies on which my youth was nourished, and 
the masters I then loved whom the natural 
thoughts of youth made eloquent ; my hope is 
to continue their finer breath, as they before 
drank from old fountains ; but chiefly I name 
them as a reminder that the main argument is 
age-long ; it does not harden into accepted 
dogma; and it is thus ceaselessly tossed be- 
cause it belongs in that sphere of our warring 
nature where conflict is perpetual. It goes on 



78 HEAKT OF MAN 

in the lives as well as on the lips of men. It 
is a question how to live as well as how to ex- 
press life. Each race uses its own tongue, 
each age its dialect ; but, change the language 
as man may, he ever remains the questioner of 
his few great thoughts. 

The defenders of the soul inherit an old 
cause that links them together in a long de- 
scent ; but the battle is always to a present 
age. Continually something is becoming su- 
perfluous, inapplicable, or wanting in the work 
of the past. Victory itself makes arms useless, 
and consigns them to dark closets. New times, 
new weapons, is the history of all warfare. 
The doubt of the validity of the ideal, never 
absent from any intellectual period, is active on 
all sides, and in more than one quarter passes 
into denial. Literature and the other arts of 
expression suffer throughout the world. To 
that point is it come that those of the old stock 
who believe that the imagination exercises 
man's faculty at its highest pitch, and that the 
method of idealism is its law, are bid step down, 
while others more newly grounded in what be- 
longs to literature possess the city ; but seeing 
the shrines interdicted, the obliteration of 



A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 79 

ancient names, tlie heroes' statues thrown down, 
shall we learn what our predecessors never 
knew — to abdicate and abandon? I hear in 
the temples the footsteps of the departing 
gods — 

Di quibus imperium hoc steterat ; 

but no; for our opponents are worse off than 
those of whom it was said that though one rose 
from the dead they would not believe, — Plato, 
being dead, yet speaks, Shakspere treads our 
boards, and (why should I hesitate?) Tenny- 
son yet breathes among us though already 
immortal. That which convinced the master 
minds of antiquity and many in later ages is 
still convincing, if it be attended to ; the old 
tradition is yet unbroken ; therefore, because I 
was bred in this faith, I will try to set forth 
anew in the phrases of our time the eternal 
ground of reason on which idealism rests. 

The specific question concerns literature and 
its method, but its import is not mainly literary. 
Life is the matter of literature ; and thence 
it comes that all leading inquiries to which 
literature gives rise probe for their premises 
to the roots of our being and expand in their 



80 HEART OF MAN 

issues to the unknown limits of human fate. 
It is an error to think of idealism as a thing 
remote, fantastic, and unsubstantial. It enters 
intimately into the lives of all men, however 
humble and unlearned, if they live at all 
except in their bodies. What is here pro- 
posed is neither speculative, technical, nor 
abstruse ; it is practical in matter, universal in 
interest, and touches upon those things which 
men most should heed. I fear rather to incur 
the reproach of uttering truisms than para- 
doxes. But he does ill who is scornful of 
the trite. To be learned in commonplaces is 
no mean education. They make up the great 
body of the people's knowledge. They are 
the living words upon the lips of men from 
generation to generation ; the real winged 
words ; the matter of the unceasing reitera- 
tion of families, schools, pulpits, libraries ; the 
tradition of mankind. Proverb, text, homily, 
— happy the youth whose purse is stored with 
these broad pieces, current in every country and 
for every good, like fairy gifts of which the 
occasion only when it arises shows the use. 
It is with truth as with beauty, — familiarity 
endears and makes it more precious. What is 



A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 81 

common is for that very reason in danger of 
neglect, and from it often flashes that divine 
surprise which most enkindles the soul. Why 
must Prometheus bring fire from heaven to 
savage man ? Did it not sleep in the flint at 
his feet ? How often, at the master stroke of 
life, has some text of Holy Scripture, which lay 
in the mind from childhood almost like the 
debris of memory, illuminated the remorseful 
darkness of the mind, or interpreted the sweet- 
ness of God's sunshine in the happy heart ! 
Common as light is love, sang Shelley ; and 
equally common with beauty and truth and 
love is all that is most vital to the soul, all that 
feeds it and gives it power ; if aught be lack- 
ing, it is the eye to see and the heart to under- 
stand. Grain, fruit and vegetable, wool, silk 
and cotton, gold, silver and iron, steam and 
electricity, — were not all, like the spark, 
within arm's reach of savage man ? The slow 
material progress of mankind through ages is 
paralleled by the slow growth of the individual 
soul in laying hold of and putting to use the 
resources of spiritual strength that are nigh 
unto it. The service of man to man in the 
ways of the spirit is, in truth, an act as simple 



82 HEAET OF MAN 

as the giving of a cup of cold water to him 
who is athirst. 

Can there be any surprise when I say that 
the method of idealism is that of all thought ? 
that in its intellectual process the art of the 
poet, so far from being a sort of incantation, is 
the same as belongs to the logician, the chemist, 
the statesman ? It is no more than to say that 
in creating literature the mind acts ; the action 
of the mind is thought ; and there are no more 
two ways of thinking than there are two kinds 
of gravitation. Experience is the matter of 
all knowledge. It is given to the mind as a 
complex of particular facts, a series, ever con- 
tinuing, of impressions outward and inward. 
It is stored in the memory, and were memory 
the only mental faculty, no other knowledge 
than this of particular facts in their temporal 
sequence could be acquired ; the sole method 
of obtaining knowledge would be by observa- 
tion. All literature would then be merely 
annals of the contents of successive moments 
in their order. Reason, however, intervenes. 
Its process is well known. In every object of 
perception, as it exists in the physical world 
and is given by sensation to our consciousness, 



A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 83 

there is both in itself and in its relations a 
likeness to other objects and relations, and this 
likeness the mind takes notice of; it thus 
analyzes the complex of experience, discerns 
the common element, and by this means classi- 
fies particular facts, thereby condensing them 
into mental conceptions, — abstract ideas, for- 
mulas, laws. The mind arrives at these in the 
course of its normal operation. As soon as we 
think at all, we speak of white and black, of 
bird and beast, of distance and size, — of uni- 
formities in the behaviour of nature, or laws ; 
by such classification of qualities, objects, and 
various relations, not merely in the sensuous 
but in every sphere of our consciousness, the 
mind simplifies its experience, compacts its 
knowledge, and economizes its energies. To 
this work it brings, also, the method of ex- 
periment. It then interferes arbitrarily with 
the natural occurrence of facts, and brings 
that to pass which otherwise would not have 
been; and this method it uses to investigate, 
to illustrate what was previously known, and 
to confirm what was surmised. Its end, 
whether through observation or experiment, 
is to reach general truth as opposed to matter- 



84 HEAET OF MAN 

of-fact, universals more or less embracing as 
opposed to particulars, the units of thought 
as opposed to the units of phenomena. The 
body of these constitutes rational knowledge. 
Nature then becomes known, not as a series 
of impressions on the retina of sense merely, 
but as a system seized by the eye of reason ; for 
the senses show man the aspect worn by the 
world as it is at the moment, but reason opens to 
him the order obtaining in the world as it must be 
at every moment ; and the instrument by which 
man rises from the phenomenal plane of expe- 
rience to the necessary sphere of truth is the 
generalizing faculty whose operation has just 
been described. The office of the reason in 
the exercise of this faculty is to find organic 
form in that experience which memory pre- 
serves in the mass, — to penetrate, that is, to 
that mould of necessity in the world which 
phenomena, when they arise, must put on. The 
species once perceived, the mind no longer cares 
for the individual ; the law once known, the 
mind no longer cares for the facts ; for in these 
universals all particular instances, past, present, 
and to come, are contained in their significance. 
All sciences are advanced in proportion as they 



A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 86 

have thus organized their appropriate matter 
in abstract conceptions and laws, and are back- 
ward in proportion as there remains much in 
their provinces not yet so coordinated and sys- 
tematized ; and in their hierarchy, from astro- 
nomical physics downward, each takes rank 
according to the nature of the universals it 
deals with, as these are more or less embracing. 
The matter of literature — that part of total 
experience which it deals with — is life ; and, 
to confine attention to imaginative literature 
where alone the question of idealism arises, the 
matter with which imaginative literature deals 
is the inward and spiritual order in man's 
breast as distinguished from the outward and 
physical order with which science deals. The 
reason as here exercised organizes man's ex- 
perience in this great tract of emotion, will, 
and meditation, and so possesses man of true 
knowledge of himself, just as in the realm 
of science it possesses him of true knowledge 
of the physical world, or, in psychology and 
metaphysics, of the constitution and processes 
of the mind itself. Such knowledge is, with- 
out need of argument, of the highest conse- 
quence to mankind. It exceeds, indeed, in 



86 HEART OF MAN 

dignity and value all other knowledge ; for to 
penetrate this inward or spiritual order, to 
grasp it with the mind and conform to it with 
the will, is not, as is the case with every other 
sort of knowledge, the special and partial effort 
of selected minds, but the daily business of all 
men in their lives. The method of the mind 
here is and must be the same with that by 
which it accomplishes its work elsewhere, its 
only method. Here, too, its concern is with 
the universal; its end is to know life — the 
life with which literature deals — not empiri- 
cally in its facts, but scientifically in its neces- 
sary order, not phenomenally in the senses but 
rationally in the mind, not without relation in 
its mere procession but organically in its laws ; 
and its instrument here, as through the whole 
gamut of the physical sciences and of philoso- 
phy itself, is the generalizing faculty. 

One difference there is between scientific and 
imaginative truth, — a difference in the mode 
of statement. Science and also philosophy for- 
mulate truth and end in the formula ; litera- 
ture, as the saying is, clothes truth in a tale. 
Imagination is brought in, and by its aid the 
mind projects a world of its own, whose prin- 



A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 87 

ciple of being is that it reembodies general or 
abstract truth, and presents it concretely to 
the eye of the mind, and in some arts gives 
it physical form. So, to draw an example 
from science itself, when Leverrier projected 
in imagination the planet Uranus, he incar- 
nated in matter a whole group of universal 
qualities and relations, all that go to make up a 
world, and in so doing he created as the poet 
creates; there was as much of truth, too, in 
his imagined world before he found the actual 
planet as there was of reality in the planet 
itself after it swam into his ken. This crea- 
tion of the concrete world of art is the joint act 
of the imagination and the reason working in 
unison ; and hence the faculty to which this act 
is ascribed is sometimes called the creative rea- 
son, or shaping power of the mind, in distinc- 
tion from the scientific intellect which merely 
knows. The term is intended to convey at once 
the double phase, under one aspect of which 
the reason controls imagination, and under the 
other aspect the imagination formulates the 
reason ; it is meant to free the idea, on the one 
hand, from that suggestion of abstraction im- 
plied by the reason, and to disembarrass it, on 



88 HEART OF MAN 

the other, of any connection with the irrational 
fancy ; for the world of art so conceived is 
necessarily both concrete, correspondent to the 
realities of experience, and truthful, subject to 
the laws of the universe ; it cannot contain the 
impossible, it cannot amalgamate the actual 
with the unreal, it cannot in any way lie and 
retain its own nature. The use of this ra- 
tional imagination is not confined to the world 
of art. It is only by its aid that we build 
up the horizons of our earthly life and fill 
them with objects and events beyond the reach 
of our senses. To it we are indebted for our 
knowledge of the greater part of others' lives, 
for our idea of the earth's surface and the 
doings of foreign nations, of all past history 
and its scene, and the events of primaeval 
nature which were even before man was. So 
far as we realize the world at all beyond the 
limit of our private experience of it, we do so 
by the power of the imagination acting on the 
lines of reason. It fills space and time for us 
through all their compass. Nor is it less opera- 
tive in the practical pursuits of men. The 
scientist lights his way with it ; the statesman 
forecasts reform by it, building in thought 



A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 89 

the state which he afterward realizes in fact ; 
the entire future lives to us — and it is the 
most important part of life — only by its in- 
cantation. The poet acts no otherwise in em- 
ploying it than the inventor and the speculator 
even, save that he uses it for the ends of reason 
instead of for his private interest. In some 
parts of this field there is, or was once, or will 
be, a physical parallel, an actuality, containing 
the verification of the imagined state of things ; 
but so, for the poet, there is a parallel, a con- 
ception of the reason just as normal, which is 
not the less real because it is a tissue of 
abstract thought. In art this governance of 
the imagination by the reason is fundamental, 
and gives to the office of the latter a seeming 
primacy ; and therefore emphasis is rightly 
placed on the universal element, the truth, as 
the substance of the artistic form. But in the 
light of this preliminary description of the men- 
tal processes involved, let us take a nearer view 
of their particular employment in literature. 

Human life, as represented in literature, con- 
sists of two main branches, character and ac- 
tion. Of these, character, which is the realm 
of personality, is generalized by means of type, 



90 HEAET OF MAN 

which is ideal character ; action, which is the 
realm of experience, by plot, which is ideal 
action. It is convenient to examine the nature 
of these separately. A type, the example of a 
class, contains the characteristic qualities which 
make an individual one of that class ; it does 
not differ in this elementary form from the 
bare idea of the species. The traits of a tree, 
for instance, exist in every actual tree, however 
stunted or imperfect; and in the type which 
condenses into itself what is common in all 
specimens of the class, these traits only exist ; 
they constitute the type. Comic types, in lit- 
erature, are often simple abstractions of some 
single human quality, and hence easily afford 
illustrations. The braggart, the miser, the 
hypocrite, contain that one trait which is com- 
mon to the class ; and in their portrayal this 
characteristic only is shown. In proportion as 
the traits are many in any character, the type 
becomes complex. In simple types attention 
is directed to some one vice, passion, or virtue, 
capable of absorbing a human life into itself. 
This is the method of Jonson, and, in tragedy, 
of Marlowe. As human energy displays itself 
more variously in a life, in complex types, the 



A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 91 

mind contemplates human nature in a more 
catholic way, with a less exclusive identifica- 
tion of character with specific trait, a more free 
conception of personality as only partially ex- 
hibited ; thus, in becoming complex, types 
gather breadth and depth, and share more in 
the mystery of humanity as something incom- 
pletely known to us at the best. Such are the 
characters of Shakspere. 

The manner in which types are arrived at 
and made recognizable in other arts opens the 
subject more fully and throws light upon their 
nature. The sculptor observes in a group of 
athletes that certain physical habits result in 
certain moulds of the body; and taking such 
characteristics as are common to all of one 
class, and neglecting such as are peculiar to 
individuals, he carves a statue. So perma- 
nent are the physical facts he relies upon 
that, centuries after, when the statue is dug 
up, men say without hesitation — here is the 
Greek runner, there the wrestler. The habit 
of each in life produces a bodily form which 
if it exists implies that habit ; the reality here 
results from the operation of physical laws 
and can be physically rendered ; the type is 



92 HEAKT OF MAN 

constituted of permanent physical fact. There 
are habits of the soul which similarly impress 
an outward stamp upon the face and form 
so certainly that expression, attitude, and 
shape authentically declare the presence of 
the soul that so reveals itself. In the Phidian 
Zeus was all awe ; in the Praxitelean Hermes 
all grace, sweetness, tenderness ; in the Pallas 
Athene of her people who carved or minted 
her image in statue, bas-relief, or coin, was all 
serene and grave wisdom ; or, in the glowing 
and chastened colours of the later artistic time, 
the Virgin mother shines out, in Fra Angelico 
all adoration, in Bellini all beatitude, in Ra- 
phael all motherhood. The sculptor and the 
painter are restricted to the bodily signs of 
the soul's presence ; but the poet passes into 
another and wider range of interpretation. 
He finds the soul stamped in its characteristic 
moods, words, actions. He then creates for 
the mind's eye Achilles, JEneas, Arthur ; and 
in his verse are beheld their spirits rather 
than their bodies. 

These several sorts of types make an ascend- 
ing series from the predominantly physical to 
the predominantly spiritual ; but, from the 



A NEW DEFENCE OF POETEY 93 

present point of view, the arts which embody 
their creations in a material form should not be 
opposed to literature which employs the least 
intervention of sensation, as if the former had a 
physical and the last a spiritual content. All 
types have one common element, they express 
personality; they have for the mind a spiritual 
meaning, what they contain of human character; 
they differ here only in fulness of represen- 
tation. The most purely physical types imply 
spiritual qualities, choice, will, command, — all 
the life which was a condition precedent to the 
bodily perfection that was its flower; and, 
though the eye rests on the beautiful form, it 
may discern through it the human soul of the 
athlete as in life ; and, moreover, the figure may 
be represented in some significant act, or mood 
even, but this last is rare. The more plainly 
spiritual types, physically rendered, are most 
often shown in some such mood or act expres- 
sive in itself of the soul whose habit lives in the 
form it has moulded. It is not that the plastic 
and pictorial arts cannot spiritualize the stone 
and the canvas as well as humanize it bodily ; 
equally with the poetic art they reveal character, 
but within narrower bounds. The limitation 



94 HEART OF MAN 

of these arts in embodying personality is one of 
scope, not of intention ; and though it springs 
out of their use of material forms, it does so in 
a peculiar way. It is not the employment of a 
physical medium of communication that differ- 
entiates them, for a physical medium of some 
sort is the only means of exchange between mind 
and mind; neither is it the employment of a 
physical basis, for all art, being concrete, rests 
on a physical basis — the world of imagination 
is exhaled from things that are. The physical 
basis of a drama, for instance, is manifest when 
it is enacted on the stage ; but it is substantially 
the same whether beheld in thought or ocularly. 
The fact is that the limitation of sculpture 
and painting and their kindred arts results from 
their use of the physical basis of life only par- 
tially, and not as a whole as literature uses it. 
They set forth their works in the single ele- 
ment of space ; they exclude the changes that 
take place in time. The types they show are 
arrested, each in its moment; or if a story 
is told by a series of representations, it is a 
succession of such moments of arrested life. 
The method is that of the camera; what is 
given is a fixed state. But literature renders 



A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 95 

life in movement; it revolves life through its 
moments as rapidlj^ as on the retina of sense ; 
its method is that of the kinetoscope. It 
holds under its command change, growth, the 
entire energy of life in action; it can chase 
mood with mood, link act to act. It alone can 
speak the word, which is the most powerful 
instrument of man. Hence the types it shows 
by presenting moods, words, and acts with the 
least obstruction of matter and the slightest 
obligation to the active senses, are the most 
complete. They have broken the bonds of the 
flesh, of moment and place. They exhibit 
themselves in actions; they speak, and in 
dialogue and soliloquy set forth their states of 
mind lying before, or accompanying, or follow- 
ing their actions, thus interpreting these more 
fully. Action by itself reveals character ; speech 
illumines it, and casts upon the action also a 
forward and a backward light. The lapse of 
time, binding all together, adds the continuous 
life of the soul. This large compass, which is 
the greatest reached by any art, rests on the 
wider command and more flexible control which 
literature exercises over that physical basis 
which is the common foundation of all the arts. 



96 HEAET OF MAN 

Hence it abounds in complex types, just as 
other arts present simple types with more fre- 
quency. All types, however, in so far as they 
appeal to the mind and interpret the inward 
world, under which aspect alone they are now 
considered, have their physical nature, materially 
or imaginatively, even though it be solely visible 
beauty, in order to express personality. 

The type, in the usage of literature, must be 
further distinguished from the bare idea of the 
species as it has thus far been defined. It is 
more than this. It is not only an example ; it 
is an example in a high state of development, if 
not perfect. The best possible tree, for instance, 
does not exist in nature, owing to a confused 
environment which does not permit its forma- 
tion. In literature a type is made a high type 
either by intensity, if it be simple, or by rich- 
ness of nature, if it be complex. Miserliness, 
braggadocio, hypocrisy, in their extremes, are 
the characters of comedy ; a rich nature, such 
as Hamlet, showing variety of faculty and 
depth of experience, is the hero of more pro- 
found drama. This truth, the necessity of high 
development in the type, underlay the old 
canon that the characters of tragedy should be 



A NEW DEFP]NCE OF POETRY 97 

of lofty rank, great place, and consequence in 
the world's affairs, preferably even of historic 
fame. The canon erred in mistaking one means 
of securing credible intensity or richness for 
the many which are possible. The end in view 
is to represent human qualities at their acme. 
In other times as a matter of fact persons 
highly placed were most likely to exhibit such 
development ; birth, station, and their oppor- 
tunities for unrestrained and conspicuous action 
made them examples of the compass of human 
energy, passion, and fate. New ages brought 
other conditions. Shakspere recognized the 
truth of the matter, and laid the emphasis 
where it belongs, upon the humanity of the 
king, not on the kingly office of the man. Said 
Henry V. : " I think the king is but a man as I 
am ; the violet smells to him as it doth to me ; 
the element shows to him as it doth to me ; all 
his senses have but human conditions ; his cere- 
monies laid by, in his nakedness he appears but 
a man; and though his appetites are higher 
mounted than ours, yet, when they stoop, they 
stoop with like wing." Such, too, was Lear in 
the tempest. And from the other end of the 
scale hear Shylock: "Hath not a Jew eyes? 



98 HEART OF MAN 

hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, 
senses, appetites, passions? fed with the same 
food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to 
the same diseases, healed by the same means, 
warmed and cooled by the same winter and 
summer as a Christian is ? If you prick us, do 
we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? 
if you poison us, do we not die? and if you 
wrong us, shall we not revenge?" Rank and 
race are accidents ; the essential thing is that 
the type be highly human, let the means of 
giving it this intensity and richness be what 
they may. 

It is true that the type may seem defective in 
the point that it is at best but a fragment of 
humanity, an abstraction or a combination of 
abstracted qualities. There was never such an 
athlete as our Greek sculptor's, never a pagan 
god nor Virgin Mother, nor a hero equal to 
Homer's thought, so beautiful, brave, and cour- 
teous, so terrible to his foe, so loving to his 
friend. And yet is it not thus that life is 
known to us actually? does not this typical 
rendering of character fall in with the natural 
habit of life? What man, what friend, is 
known to us except by fragments of his spirit ? ' 



A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 99 

Only one life, our own, is known to us as a con- 
tinuous existence. Just as when we see an 
orange, we supply the further side and think of 
it as round, so with men we supply from our- 
selves the unseen side that makes the man com- 
pletely and continuously human. Moreover, it 
is a matter of common experience that men, we 
ourselves, may live only in one part, and the 
best, of our nature at one moment, and yet for 
the moment be absorbed in that activity both in 
consciousness and energy ; for that moment we 
are only living so; now, if a character were 
shown to us only in the moments in which he 
was living so, at his best and in his charac- 
teristic state as the soldier, the priest, the lover, 
then the ideal abstraction of literature would not 
differ from the actuality of our experience. In 
this selfsame way we habitually build for our- 
selves ideal characters out of dead and living 
men, by dwelling on that part of their career 
which we most admire or love as showing their 
characteristic selves. Napoleon is the con- 
queror, St. Francis the priest, Washington the 
great citizen, only by this method. They are 
not thereby de-humanized ; neither do the ideal 
types of imagination fail of humanization be- 



100 HEART OF MAN 

cause they are thus fragmeiitarily, but consist- 
ently, presented. 

The type must make this human appeal 
under all circumstances. Its whole meaning 
and virtue lie in what it contains of our com- 
mon humanity, in the clearness and brilliancy 
with which it interprets the man in us, in the 
force with which it identifies us with human 
nature. If it is separated from us by a too high 
royalty or a too base villany, it loses intelli- 
gibility, it forfeits sympathy, it becomes more 
and more an object of simple curiosity, and re- 
moves into the region of the unknown. Even 
if the type passes into the supernatural, into 
fairyland or the angelic or demoniac world, 
it must not leave humanity behind. These 
spheres are in fact fragments of humanity 
itself, projections of its sense of wonder, its 
goodness, and its evil, in extreme abstraction 
though concretely felt. Fairy, angel, and devil 
cease to be conceivable except as they are 
human in trait, however the conditions of their 
nature may be fancied; for we have no other 
materials to build with save those of our life 
on earth, though we may combine them in 
ways not justified by reason. In so far as these 



A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 101 

worlds are in the limits of rational imagination, 
they are derived from humanity, partial inter- 
pretations of some of its moods, portions of 
itself ; and the beings who inhabit them are im- 
paired for the purposes of art in the degree to 
which their abstract nature is felt as stripping 
them of complete humanity. For this reason 
in dealing with such simple types, being 
natures all of one strain, it has been found best 
in practice to import into them individually 
some quality widely common to men in addi- 
tion to that limited quality they possess by 
their conception. Some touch of weakness in 
an angel, some touch of pity in a devil, some 
unmerited misfortune in an Ariel, bring them 
home to our bosoms ; just as the frailty of the 
hero, however great he be, humanizes him at a 
stroke. Thus these abstract fragments also are 
reunited with humanity, with the whole of life 
in ourselves. 

Types, then, whether simple or complex, 
whether apparently physical or purely spiritual, 
whether given fragmentarily or as wholes of 
personality, express human character in its es- 
sential traits. They may be narrow or broad 
generalizations; but if to know ourselves be 



102 HEART OF MAN .► - • • 

our aim, those types, which show man his com- 
mon and enduring nature, are the most valuable, 
and rank first i"n importance ; in proportion as 
they are specialized, they are less widely inter- 
pretative ; in proportion as they escape from 
time and place, race, culture, and religion, and 
present man eternal and universal in his pri- 
mary actions, moods, and passions, they appeal to 
a greater number and with more permanence; 
they become immortal in becoming universal. 
To preserve this universality is the essence of 
the type, and the degree of universality it 
reaches is its measure of value to men. It is 
immaterial whether it be simple as Ajax or 
complex as Hamlet, whether it be the work of 
imagination solely as in Hercules, or have a his- 
torical basis as in Agamemnon ; its exemplary 
rendering of man in general is its substance and 
constitutes its ideality. 

Action, the second great branch of life, is 
generalized by plot. It lies, as has been said, 
in the region of experience. Character, though 
it may be conceived as latent, can be presented 
only energetically as it finds outward expres- 
sion. It cannot be shown in a vacuum. It 
embodies or reveals itself in an act; form and 



A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 103 

feature, as expressive of character, are the record 
of past acts. This act is the link that binds 
type to plot. By means of it character enters 
the external world, determining the course of 
events and being passively affected by them. 
Plot takes account of this interplay and sets 
forth its laws. It is, therefore, more deeply 
engaged with the environment, as type is more 
concerned with the man in himself. It is, ini- 
tially, a thing of the outward as type is a thing 
of the inward world. How, then, does litera- 
ture, through plot, reduce the environment in 
its human relations to organic form? 

The course of events, taken as a whole, is in 
part a process of nature independent of man, in 
part the product of his will. It is a continuous 
stream of phenomena in great multiplicity, and 
proceeding in a temporal sequence. Science 
deals with that portion of the whole which is 
independent of man, and may be called natural 
events, and by discerning causal relations in 
them arrives at the conception of law as a 
principle of unchanging and necessary order 
in nature. Science seeks to reduce the multi- 
plicity and heterogeneity of facts as they occur 
to these simple formulas of law. Science does 



104 HEART OF MAN 

not begin in reality until facts end ; facts, ten 
or ten thousand, are indifferent to her after the 
law which contains them is found, and are a 
burden to her until it is found. Literature, in 
its turn, deals with human events ; and, in the 
same way as science, by attending to causal re- 
lations, arrives at the conception of spiritual 
law as a similarly permanent principle in the 
order of the soul. This causal unity is the car- 
dinal idea of plot which by definition is a series 
of events causally related and conceived as a 
unit, technically called the action. Plot is 
thus analogous to an illustrative experiment in 
science ; it is a concrete example of law, — it is 
law operating. 

The course of events again, so far as they 
stand in direct connection with human life, 
may be thought of as the expression of the in- 
dividual's own will, or of that of his environ- 
ment. The will of the environment may be 
divided into three varieties, the will of nature, 
the will of other men, and the will of God. In 
each case it is will embodied in events. If these 
ideas be all merged in the conception of the 
world as a totality whose course is the unfold- 
ing of one Divine will operant throughout it 



A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 105 

and called Fate or Providence, then the indi- 
vidual will, through which, as through nature 
also, the Divine will works, is only its servant. 
Action so conceived, the march of events under 
some heavenly power working through the 
mass of human will which it overrules in con- 
junction with its own more comprehensive 
purposes, is epic action; in it characters are 
subordinate to the main progress of the action, 
they are only terms in the action ; however free 
they may be apparently, considered by them- 
selves, that freedom is within such limits as to 
allow entire certainty of result, its mutations 
are included in the calculation of the Divine 
will. The action of the JEneid is of this na- 
ture : a grand series of destined events worked 
out through human agency to fulfil the plan of 
the ruler of all things in heaven and earth. On 
the other hand, if the course of events be more 
narrowly attended to within the limits of the in- 
dividual's own activity, as the expression pri- 
marily and significantly of his personal will, then 
the successive acts are subordinate to the char- 
acter ; they are terms of the character which is 
thereby exhibited; they externalize the soul. 
Action, so conceived, is dramatic action. If in 



106 HEART OF MAN 

the course of events there arises a conflict be- 
tween the will of the individual and that of his 
environment, whether nature, man, or God, then 
the seed of tragedy, specifically, is present ; this 
conflict is the essential idea of tragedy. In all 
these varieties of action, the scene is the ex- 
ternal world ; plot lies in that world, and sets 
forth the order, the causal principle, obtaining 
in it. 

It is necessary, however, to refine upon this 
statement of the matter. The course of exter- 
nal events, in so far as it affects one person, 
whether as proceeding from or reacting upon 
him, reveals character, and has meaning as an 
interpretation of inward life. It is a series 
outward indeed, but parallel with the states of 
will, intellect, and emotion which make up the 
consciousness of the character ; and it is inter- 
esting humanly only as a mirror of them. It 
is not the murderous blow, but the depraved 
will ; not the pale victim, but the shocked con- 
science ; not the muttered prayer, the frantic 
penance, the suicide, but remorse working itself 
out, that hold our attention. Plot here mani- 
fests the law of character outwardly; but the 
human reality lies within, and to be seen requires 



A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 107 

the illumination which only our own hearts can 
give. All action is such a shadowing forth of 
the soul. The constancy, the intimacy, the pro- 
fundity with which Shakspere felt this, from 
the earliest syllables of his art, and the fre- 
quency with which he dwells upon it, mark a 
characteristic of genius. Says Richard II. : — 

" 'Tis very true, my grief lies all within ; 
And these external manners of lament 
Are merely shadows to the unseen grief 
That swells in silence in the tortured soul ; 
There lies the substance." 

So Theseus, of the play of the rude artisans of 
Athens, excusing all art: ''The best in this 
kind are but shadows." So Hamlet; so Pros- 
pero. 

Action is vital in us, and has a double order 
of phenomena; so far as these are physical, 
their law is one of the physical world, and 
interests us no more than other physical laws ; 
so far as they belong in the inward world of 
self-consciousness, their law is spiritual, and has 
human interest as being operant in a soul like 
our own. The external fact is seized by the eye 
as a part of nature ; the internal fact is of the 
unseen world, and is beheld only in the light 



108 HEART OF MAN 

which is within our own bosoms — it is spiritu- 
ally discerned. On the stage plainly this is the 
case. So far as the actions are for the eye of 
sense alone they are merely spectacular ; so far 
as they express desires and energies, they are 
dramatic, and these we do not see but feel 
according as our experience permits us so to 
comprehend them. We contemplate a world 
of emotion there in connection with the active 
energy of the will, a world of character in 
operation in man; we feed it from our life, 
interpret it therefrom, build it up in ourselves, 
suffering the illusion till absorbed in what is 
arising in our consciousness under the actor's 
genius we become ourselves the character. 
The greatest actor is he who makes the specta- 
tor play the part. So far is the drama from 
the scene that it goes on in our own bosoms; 
there is the stage without any illusion whatso- 
ever ; the play is vital for the moment in our- 
selves. 

And what is true of the stage is true of 
life. It is only through our own hearts that 
we look into the hearts of others. We inter- 
pret the external signs of sense in terms of per- 
sonality and experience known only within us ; 



A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 109 

the life of will, head, and heart that we ascribe 
to our nearest and dearest friends is something 
imagined, something never seen any more than 
our own personality. Thus our knowledge of 
them is not only fragmentary, as has been said ; 
it is imaginative even within its limits. It is, 
in reality as well as in art, a shadow- world we 
live in, believing that within its sensuous films 
a spirit like unto ourselves abides, — the human 
soul, though never seen face to face. To enter 
this substantial world behind the phenomena of 
human life as sensibly shown in imagination, 
to know the invisible things of personality and 
experience, and to set them forth as a spiritual 
order, is the main end of ideal art. Though in 
plot the outward order is brought into the full- 
est prominence, and may seem to occupy the 
field, yet it is significantly only the shadow of 
that order within. 

In thus presenting plot as the means by 
which the history of a single soul is external- 
ized, one important element has been excluded 
from consideration. The causal chain of events, 
which constitutes plot, has a double unity, an- 
swering to the double order of phenomena in 
action as a state of mind and a state of external 



no HEART OF MAN 

fact. Under one aspect, so much of the action 
as is included in any single life and is there a 
linked sequence of mental states, has its unity 
in the personality of that individual. Under 
the other aspect, the entire action which sets 
forth the relations of all the characters in- 
volved, of their several courses of experience 
as elements in the working out of the joint 
result, has its unity in the constitution of the 
universe, — the impersonal order, that structure 
of being itself, which is independent of man's 
will, which is imposed upon him as a condition 
of existence, and which he must accept without 
appeal. This necessity, to give it the best name, 
to which man is exposed without and subjected 
within, is in its broadest conception the power 
that increases life, and all things are under its 
sway. Its sphere is above man's will; he 
knows it as immutable law in himself as it 
is in nature ; it is the highest object of his 
thoughts. Its workings are submitted to his 
observation and experiment as a part of the 
world of knowledge; he sees its operation in 
individuals, social groups, and nations, and sets 
it forth in the action of the lyric, the drama, 
and the epic as the law of life. In its sphere 



A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 111 

is the higher unity of plot by virtue of which 
it integrates many lives in one main action. 
Such, then, is the nature of plot as intermedi- 
ary between man and his environment, but 
deeply engaged in the latter, and not to be 
freed from it even by a purely spiritualistic 
philosophy; for though we say that, as under 
one aspect plot shadows forth the unseen world 
of the soul's life, so under the other it shadows 
forth the invisible will of God, we do not escape 
from the outward world. Sense is still the 
medium by which only man knows his brother 
man and God also as through a glass darkly, — 

" The painted veil which those who live call life." 

It separates all spirits, the beautiful but dense 
element in which the pure soul is submerged. 

It is necessary only to summarize the char- 
acteristics of plot which are merely parallel to 
those of type already illustrated. Plot may 
be simple or complex ; it may be more or less 
involved in physical conditions in proportion as 
it lays stress on its machinery or its psychol- 
ogy ; it must be important, as the type must be 
high, but important by virtue of its essential 
human meaning and not of its accidents ; it is 



112 HEART OF MAN 

a fragment of destiny only, but in this falls in 
with the way life in others is known to us ; if 
it passes into the superhuman world, it must 
retain human significance and be brought back 
to man's life by devices similar to those used in 
the type for the same purpose ; it rises in value 
in proportion to the universality it contains, 
and gains depth and permanence as it is inter- 
pretative of common human fate at all times 
and among all men ; it may be purely imaginary 
or founded on actual incidents; and its exem- 
plary interpretation of man's life is its sub- 
stance, and constitutes its ideality. 

In the discussion of type and plot, the con- 
crete nature of the world of art, which was 
originally stated to be the characteristic work 
of the creative reason, or imagination acting in 
conformity with truth, has been assumed ; but 
no reason has been given for it, because it 
seemed best to develop first with some fulness 
the nature of that inward order which is thus 
projected in the forms of art. It belongs to the 
frailty of man that he seizes with difficulty and 
holds with feebleness the pure ideas of the 
intellect, the more in proportion as they are 
removed from sense.; and he seeks to support 



A NEW DEFENCE OE POETRY 113 

himself against this weakness by framing sen- 
sible representations of the abstract in which 
the mind can rest. Thus in all lands and 
among savage tribes, as well as in the most 
civilized nations, symbols have been used im- 
memorially. The flag of a nation has all its 
meaning because it is taken as a physical token 
of national honour, almost of national life itself. 
The Moslem crescent, the Christian cross, have 
only a similar significance, a bringing near to 
the eye of what exists in reality only for the 
mind and heart. A symbol, however, is an ar- 
bitrary fiction, and stands to the idea as a meta- 
phor does to the thing itself. In literature the 
parable of the mustard seed to which the king- 
dom of heaven was likened, exemplifies sym- 
bolical or metaphorical method; but the tale 
of the court of Arthur's knights, ideal method ; 
between them, and sharing something of both, 
lies allegorical method. Idolatry is the religion 
of symbolism, for the image is not the god; 
Christianity is the religion of idealism, for 
Christ is God incarnate. Idealism presents the 
reality itself, the universal truth made manifest 
in the concrete type, and there present and 
embodied in its characteristics as they are, not 



114 HEAET OF MAN 

merely arbitrarily by a fiction of thought, sym- 
bolically or allegorically. 

The way in which type concretes truth is 
sufficiently plain ; but it may be useful, with 
respect to plot, to draw out more in detail the 
analogy which has been said to exist between 
it and an illustrative scientific experiment. If 
scientific law is declared experimentally, the 
course of nature is modified by intent ; certain 
conditions are secured, certain others elimi- 
nated; a selected train of phenomena is then 
set in motion to the end that the law may 
be illustrated, and nothing else. In a perfect 
experiment the law is in full operation. In 
plot there is a like selection of persons, situa- 
tions, and incidents so arranged as to disclose 
the working of that order which obtains in 
man's life. The law may be simple and shown 
by means of few persons and incidents in a brief 
way, as in ancient drama, or complex and exhib- 
ited with many characters in an abundance of 
action over a wide scene as in Shakspere ; in 
either case equally there is a selection from the 
whole mass of man's life of what shall illus- 
trate the causal union in its order and show 
it in action. The process in the epic or prose 



A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 115 

narrative is the same. The common method of 
all is to present the universal law in a particu- 
lar instance made for the purpose. 

In thus clothing itself in concrete form, truth 
suffers no transformation; it remains what it 
was, general truth, the very essence of type and 
plot being, as has been said, to preserve this 
universality in the particular instance. There 
is a sense in which this general truth is more 
real, as Plato thought, than particulars ; a sense 
in which the phenomenal world is less real than 
the system of nature, for phenomena come and 
go, but the law remains ; a sense in which the 
order in man's breast is more real than he is, in 
whom it is manifest, for the form of ideas, the 
mould of law, are permanent, but their expres- 
sion in us transitory. It is this higher realism, 
as it was anciently called, that the mind strives 
for in idealism, — this organic form of life, the 
object of all rational knowledge. Types, under 
their concrete disguise, are thus only a part of 
the general notions of the mind found in every 
branch of knowledge and necessary to thought ; 
plots, similarly, are only a part of the general 
laws of the ordered world ; literature in using 
them, and specializing them in concrete form 



116 HEART OF MAN 

by which alone they differ in appearance from 
like notions and laws elsewhere, merely avails 
itself of that condensing faculty of the mind 
which most economizes mental effort and loads 
conceptions with knowledge. In the type it is 
not personal, but human character that interests 
the mind ; in plot, it is not personal, but human 
fate. 

While it is true that the object of ideal 
method is to reach universals, and reembody 
them in particular instances, this reasoning ac- 
tion is often obscurely felt by the imagination 
in its creative process. The very fact that its 
operation is through the concrete complicates 
the process. The mind of genius working out 
its will does not usually start with a logical 
attempt consciously ; it does not arrive at truth 
in the abstract and then reduce it to concrete 
illustration in any systematic way ; it does not 
select the law and then shape the plot. The 
poet is rather directly interested in certain char- 
acters and events that appeal to him ; his sym- 
pathies are aroused, and he proceeds to show 
forth, to interpret, to create ; and in proportion 
as the characters he sets in motion and the 
circumstances in which they are placed have 



A NEW DEFENCE OF POETKY 117 

moulding force, they will develop traits and 
express themselves in influences that he did not 
foresee. This is a matter of familiar know- 
ledge to authors, who frequently discover in the 
trend of the imaginary tale a will of its own, 
which has its unforeseen way. The drama or 
story, once set in motion, tends to tell itself, 
just as life tends to develop in the world. The 
vitality of the clay it works in, is one of the 
curious experiences of genius, and occasions 
that mood of mystery in relation to their crea- 
tures frequently observed in great writers. In 
fact, this mode of working in the concrete, 
which is characteristic of the creative imagina- 
tion, gives to its activity an inductive and ex- 
perimental character, not to be confounded with 
the demonstrative act of the intellect which 
states truth after knowing it, and not in the 
moment of its discovery. In literature this 
moment of discovery is what makes that flash 
which is sometimes called intuition, and is one 
of the great charms of genius. 

The concrete nature of ideal art, to touch 
conveniently here upon a related though minor 
topic, is also the reason that it expresses more 
than its creator is aware of. In imaging life he 



118 HEART OF MAN 

includes more reality than he attends to; but 
if his representation has been made with truth, 
others may perceive phases of reality that he 
neglected. It is the mark of genius, as has 
hitherto appeared, to grasp life, not fragmen- 
tarily, but in the whole. So, in a scientific 
experiment, intended to illustrate one particu- 
lar form of energy, a spectator versed in another 
science may detect some truth belonging in his 
own field. This richer significance of great 
works is especially found where the union of 
the general and the particular is strong ; where 
the fusion is complete, as in Hamlet. In a 
sense he is more real than living men, and we 
can analyze his nature, have doubts about his 
motives, judge differently of his character, and 
value his temperament more or less as one 
might with a friend. The more imaginative a 
character is, in the sense that his personality 
and experience are given in the whole so that 
one feels the bottom of reality there, the more 
significance it has. Thus in the world of art 
discoveries beyond the intention of the writer 
may be made as in the actual world; so much 
of reality does it contain. 

Will it be said that, in making primary the 



A NEW DEFENCE OE POETRY 119 

universal contents and spiritual significance of 
type and plot, I have made literature didactic, 
as if the word should stop my mouth ? If it is 
meant by this that I maintain that literature 
conveys truth, it may readily be admitted, since 
only thus can it interest the mind which has its 
whole life in the pursuit and its whole joy in 
the possession of truth. But if it be meant that 
abstract or moral instruction has been made the 
business of literature, the charge may be met 
with a disclaimer, as should be evident, first, 
from the emphasis placed on its concrete deal- 
ing with persons and actions. On the contrary, 
literature fails in art precisely in proportion 
as it becomes expressly such a teacher. Sec- 
ondly, the life which literature organizes, the 
whole of human nature in its relation to the 
world, is many-sided; and imaginative genius, 
the creative reason, grasps it in its totality. 
The moral aspect is but one among many that 
life wears. If ethics are implicit in the mass 
of life, so also are beauty and passion, pathos, 
humour, and terror; and in literature any one 
of these may be the prominent phase at the 
moment, for literature gives out not only prac- 
tical moral wisdom, but all the reality of life. 



120 HEART OF MAN 

Literature is didactic in the reproachful sense 
of the word only in proportion as type and plot 
are distinctly separated from the truth they em- 
body, and ceases to be so in proportion as these 
are blended and unified. The fable is one of 
the most ancient forms of such didactic litera- 
ture ; in it a story is told to enforce a lesson, 
and animals are made the characters, in con- 
sequence of which it has the touch of humour 
inseparable from the spectacle of beasts playing 
at being men ; but the very fact that the moral 
is of men and the tale is of beasts involves a 
separation of the truth from its concrete embodi- 
ment, and besides the moral is stated by itself. 
In the Oriental apologue an advance is made. 
The parables of our Lord, in particular, are 
admirable examples of its method. The char- 
acters are few, the situations common, the ac- 
tion simple, and the moral truth or lesson 
enforced is so completely clothed in the tale 
that it needs no explanation ; at the same time, 
the mind is aware of the teacher. In the higher 
forms of literature, however, the fusion of ethics 
with life may be complete. Here the poet works 
so subtly that the mind is not aware of the 
illumination of this light which comes without 



A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 121 

the violence of the preacher, until after the fact; 
and, indeed, the effect is wrought more through 
the sympathies than the reason. In such a case 
literature, though it conveys moral with other 
kinds of truth, is not open to the charge of 
didacticism, which is valid only when teaching- 
is explicit and abstract. The educative power 
of literature, however, is not diminished because 
in its art it dispenses with the didactic method, 
which by its very definiteness is inelastic and 
narrow; in fact, the more imaginative a char- 
acter is, the more fruitful it may be even in 
moral truth ; it may teach, as has been said, 
what the poet never dreamed his work con- 
tained. 

If, then, to sum up the argument thus far, 
the subject-matter of literature is life in the 
forms of personality and experience, and the 
particular facts with respect to these are gener- 
alized by means of type and plot in concrete 
form, and so are set forth as phases of an 
ordered world for the intelligence, to the end 
that man may know himself in the same way 
as he knows natuie in its living system — if this 
be so, what standing have those who would re- 
strict literature to tlic actual in life? who would 



122 HEART OF MAN 

replace ideal types of manhood by the men of 
the time, and the ordered drama of the stage by 
the medley of life? They deny art, which is the 
instrument of the creative reason, to literature ; 
for as soon as art, which is the process of creat- 
ing a rational world, begins, the necessity for 
selection arises, and with it the whole question 
of values, facts being no longer equal among 
themselves on the score of actuality, nor in 
fitness for the work in hand. The trivial, the 
accidental, the unmeaning, are rejected, and 
there will be no stopping short of the end ; for 
art, being the handmaid of truth, can employ no 
other than the method of all reason, wherefore 
idealism is to it what abstraction is to logic and 
induction to natural science, — the breath of 
its rational being. Those who hold to realism 
in its extreme form, as a representation of the 
actual only, behave as if one should say to 
the philosopher — leave this formulation of 
general notions and be content with sensible 
objects; or to the scientist — experiment no 
more, but observe the course of nature as it may 
chance to arise, and describe it in its succession. 
They bid us be all eye, no mind; all sense, no 
thought ; all chance, all confusion, no order, 



A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 123 

no organization, no fabric of the reason. But 
there are no such realists ; though pure realism 
has its place, as will hereafter be shown, it is 
usually found mixed with ideal method; and 
as commonly employed the word designates the 
preference merely for types and plots of much 
detail, of narrow application, of little meaning, 
in opposition to the highly generalized and sig- 
nificant types and plots usually associated with 
the term idealism. In what way such realism 
has its place will also appear at a later stage. 
Here it is necessary to say no more than that 
in proportion as realism uses the ideal method 
only at the lowest, it narrows its appeal, weak- 
ens its power, and takes from literature her 
highest distinction by virtue of which she 
grasps the whole of character and fate in her 
creation and informs man of the secrets of his 
human heart, the course of his mortal destiny, 
and the end of all his spiritual effort and aspi- 
ration. 

I am aware that I have not proceeded so 
far without starting objections. To meet that 
which is most grave, what shall I say when 
it is alleged that there is no order sucli as 1 
have assumed in life ; or, if there be, that it is 



124 HEART OF MAN 

insufficiently known, too intangible and com- 
plex, too various in different races and ages, to 
be made the subject of such an exposition . as 
obtains of natural order? Were this assertion 
true, yet there would be good reason to retain 
our illusion : for the mind delights in order, and 
will invent it. The mind is perplexed and dis- 
turbed until it finds this order ; and in the pro- 
gressive integration of its experience into an 
ordered world lies its work. Art gives pleasure 
to the intellect, because in its structure what- 
ever is superfluous and extrinsic has been elimi- 
nated, so that the mind contemplates an artistic 
work as a unity of relations bound each to each 
which it fully comprehends. Such works, we say, 
have form, which is just this interdependence 
of parts wholly understood which appeals to the 
intellect, and satisfies it : they would please the 
mind, though the order they embody were 
purely imaginary, just as science would de- 
light it, were the order of nature itself illusory. 
Creative art would thus still have a ground of 
being under a sceptical philosophy ; man would 
delight to dream his dream. But it is not 
necessary to take this lower line of argument. 
It does not appear to me to be open to ques- 



A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 125 

tion that there is in the soul of man a nature 
and an order obtaining in it as permanent and 
universal as in the material world. The soul 
of man has a common being in all. There could 
be no science of logic, psychology, or metaphys- 
ics on the hypothesis of any uncertainty as to 
the identity of mind in all, nor any science of 
ethics on the hypothesis of any variation as to 
the identity of the will in all, nor any ground 
of expression even, of communication between 
man and man, on the hypothesis of any radical 
difference in the experience and faculties to 
which all expression appeals for its intelligi- 
bility ; neither could there be any system of 
life in social groups, or plan for education, 
unless such a common basis is accepted. The 
postulate of a common human nature is analo- 
gous to that of the unity of matter in science ; 
it finds its complete expression in the doctrine 
of the brotherhood of man, for if race be funda- 
mentally distinguished from race as was once 
thought, it is only as element is distinguished 
from element in the old chemistry. So, too, the 
postulate of an order obtaining in the soul, uni- 
versal and necessary, independent of man's voli- 
tion, analogous in all respects to the order of 



126 HEART OF MAN 

nature, is parallel with that of the constancy of 
physical law. A rational life expects this order. 
The first knowledge of it comes to us, as that 
of natural law, by experience ; in the social 
world — the relations of men to one another — 
and in the more important region of our own 
nature we learn the issue of certain courses of 
action as well as in the external world ; in our 
own lives and in our dealings with others we 
come to a knowledge of, and a conformity to, 
the conditions under which we live, the laws 
operant in our being, as well as those of the phys- 
ical world. Literature assumes this order; in 
-^schylus, Cervantes, or Shakspere, it is this 
that gives their work interest. Apart from nat- 
ural science, the whole authority of the past 
in its entire accumulation of wisdom rests upon 
the permanence of this order, and its capacity 
to be known by man ; that virtue makes men 
noble and vice renders them base, is a statement 
without meaning unless this order is continuous 
through ages ; all principles of action, all 
schemes of culture, would be uncertain except 
on this foundation. 

So near is this order to us that it was known 
long before science came to any maturity. 



A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 127 

We have added, in truth, little to our know- 
ledge of humanity since the Greeks; and if 
one wonders why ethics came before science, 
let him own at least that its priority shows that 
it is near and vital in life as science is not. 
We can do, it seems, without Kepler's laws, but 
not without the Decalogue. The race acquires 
first what is most needful for life ; and man's 
heart was always with him, and his fate near. A 
second reason, it may be noted, for the later 
development of science is that our senses, as 
used by science, are more mental now, and the 
object itself is observable only by the interven- 
tion of the mind through the telescope or micro- 
scope or a hundred instruments into which, 
though physical, the mind enters. Our meth- 
ods, too, as well as our instruments, are things 
of the mind. It behooves us to remember in an 
age which science is commonly thought to have 
materialized, that more and more the mind 
enters into all results, and fills an ever larger 
place in life; and this should serve to make 
materialism seem more and more what it is — 
a savage conception. But recognizing the 
great place of mind in modern science, and 
its growing illumination of our earthly sys- 



128 HEART OF MAN 

tern, I am not disposed to discredit its earli- 
est results in art and morals. I find in this 
penetration of the order of the world within 
us our most certain truth; and as our bodies 
exist only by virtue of sharing in the general 
order of nature, so, I believe, our souls have 
being only by sharing in this order of the 
inward, the spiritual world. 

What, then, is this order? We do not 
merely contemplate it: we are immersed in it, 
it is vital in us, it is that wherein we live and 
move and have our being, ever more and more 
in proportion as the soul's life outvalues the 
body in our experience. It is necessary to ex- 
pand our conception of it. Hitherto it has been 
presented only as an order of truth appealing 
to the intellect: but the intellect is only one 
function of the soul, and thinkers are the 
merest fraction of mankind. We know this 
order not only as truth, but as righteousness ; we 
know that certain choices end in enlarging and 
invigorating our faculties, and other choices 
in their enfeeblement and extinction; and the 
race adds, acting under the profound motive of 
self-preservation, that it is a duty to do the one 
thing and avoid the other, and stores up this 



A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 129 

doctrine in conscience. We know this order 
again under the aspect of joy, for joy attends 
some choices, and sorrow others; and again 
under the aspect of beauty, for certain choices 
result in beauty and others in deformity. 
What I maintain is that this order exists under 
four aspects, and may be learned in any of them 
— as an order of truth in the reason, as an order 
of virtue in the will, as an order of joy in the 
emotions, as an order of beauty in the senses. 
It is the same order, the same body of law, oper- 
ating in each case ; it is the vital force of our 
fourfold life, — it has one unity in the intellect, 
the will, the emotions, the senses, — is equal to 
the whole nature of man, and responds to him 
and sustains him on every side. A lover of 
beauty in whom conscience is feeble cannot 
wander if he follow beauty ; nor a cold thinker 
err, though without a moral sense, if he accept 
truth ; nor a just man, nor a seeker after pure 
joy merely, if they act according to knowledge 
each in his sphere. The course of action that 
increases life may be selected because it is rea- 
sonable, or joyful, or beautiful, or right; and 
therefore one may say fearlessly, choose the 
things that are beautiful, the things that are 



130 HEART OF MAN 

joyful, the things that are reasonable, the things 
that are right, and all else shall be added unto 
you. The binding force in this order is what 
literature, ideal literature, most brings out and 
emphasizes in its generalizations, that causal 
union which has hitherto been spoken of in the 
region of plot only ; but it exists in every aspect 
of this order, and literature universalizes ex- 
perience in all these realms, in the provinces 
of beauty and passion no less than in those of 
virtue and knowledge, and its method is the 
same in all. 

Is not our knowledge of this fourfold order 
in its principles, in those relations of its phe- 
nomena which constitute its laws, of the high- 
est importance of anything of human concern? 
In harmony with these laws, and only thus, we 
ourselves, in whom this order is, become happy, 
righteous, wise, and beautiful. In ideal litera- 
ture this knowledge is found, expressed, and 
handed down age after age — the knowledge 
of necessary and permanent relations in these 
great spheres which, taken together, exhaust 
the capacities of life. Man's moral sense is 
strong in proportion as he apprehends necessity 
in the sequence of will and act; his intellect 



A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 131 

is strong, his emotions, his sense of beauty, 
are strong in the same way in proportion as 
he apprehends necessity in each several field 
of experience. And conversely, the weakness of 
the intellect lies in a greater or less failure to 
realize relations of fact in their logic ; and the 
other faculties, in proportion as they fail to 
realize such relations in their own region, have 
a similar incapacity. Insanity, in the broad 
sense, is involuntary error in a nature incapa- 
ble of effectual enlightenment, and hence abnor- 
mal or diseased ; but the state of error, whether 
more or less, whether voluntary or involuntary, 
whether curable or incurable, in itself is the 
same. To take an example from one sphere, in 
the moral world the criminal through ignorance 
of or distrust in or revolt from the supreme 
divine law seeks to maintain himself by his own 
power solitarily as if he might be a law unto 
himself; he experiences, without the interven- 
tion of any human judge, the condemnation 
which consigns him to enfeeblement and extinc- 
tion through the decay and death of his nature, 
as a moral being, stage by stage ; this is God's 
justice, visiting sin with death. Similarly, and 
to most more obviously, in society itself, the 



132 HEART OF MAN 

criminal against society, because he does not 
understand, or believe, or prefers not to accept 
arbitrary social law as the means by which 
necessarily the general good, including his own, 
is worked out, seeks to substitute for it his own 
intelligence, his cunning, in his search for pros- 
perity, as he conceives it, by an adaptation of 
means to ends on his own account. This is why 
the imperfection of human law is sometimes a 
just excuse for social crime in those whom 
society does not benefit, its slaves and pariahs. 
But whether in God's world or in man's, the 
mind of the criminal, disengaging itself from 
reliance on the whole fabric for whatever rea- 
son, pulverizes because he fails to realize the 
necessary relations of the world in which he 
lives in their normal operation, and has no 
effectual belief in them as unavoidably operant 
in his nature or over his fortunes. This was 
the truth that lay in the Platonic doctrine that 
all sin is ignorance ; but Plato did not take 
account of any possible depravity in the will. 
Nor is what has been illustrated above true of 
the mind and the will only. In the region of 
emotion and of beauty, there may be similar 
aberration, if these are not grasped in their vital 



A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 133 

nature, in organic relation to the whole of 
life. 

These several parts of our being are not inde- 
pendent of one another, but are in the closest 
alliance. They act conjointly and with one result 
in the single soul in which they find their unity 
as various energies of one personal power. It 
cannot be that contradiction should arise among 
them in their right operation, nor the error of 
one continue undetected by the others ; that the 
base should be joyful or the wicked beautiful 
in reality, is impossible. In the narrow view 
the lust of the eye and the pride of life may 
seem beautiful, but in the broad perspective of 
the inward world they take on ugliness ; in the 
moment they may seem pleasurable, but in the 
backward reach of memory they take on pain ; 
to assert eternity against the moment, to see 
life in the whole, to live as if all of life were 
concentrated in its instant, is the chief labour of 
the mind, the eye, the heart, the enduring will, 
all together. To represent a villain as attrac- 
tive is an error of art, which thus misrepresents 
the harmony of our nature. Satan, as conceived 
by Milton, may seem to be a majestic figure, but 
he was not so to Milton's imagination. " The 



134 HEART OF MAN 

infernal Serpent" is the first name the poet 
gives him ; and though sublime imagery of 
gloom and terror is employed to depict his 
diminished brightness and inflamed malice, 
Milton repeatedly takes pains to degrade him 
to the eye, as when in Paradise he is surprised 
at the ear of Eve " squat like a toad " ; and 
when he springs up in his own form there, as 
the " grisly king," he mourns most his beauty 
lost; neither is his resolute courage long ad- 
mirable. To me, at least, so far from having 
any heroic quality, he seems always the malign 
fiend sacrificing innocence to an impotent re- 
venge. In all great creations of art it is neces- 
sary that this consistency of beauty, virtue, 
reason, and joy should be preserved. 

It is true that the supremacy of law in this 
inward world, so constituted, is less realized than 
in the physical world ; but even in the latter the 
wide conviction of its supremacy is a recent 
thing, and in some parts of nature it is still 
lightly felt, especially in those which touch the 
brain most nearly, while under the stress of ex- 
ceptional calamity or strong desire or traditional 
religious beliefs it often breaks down. But if 
the order of the material universe seems now a 



A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 135 

more settled thing than the spiritual law of the 
soul, once the case was reversed; God was 
known and nature miraculous. It must be 
remembered, too, in excuse of our feebleness 
of faith, that we are born bodily into the physi- 
cal world and are forced to live under its law; 
but life in the spiritual world is more a matter 
of choice, at least in respect to its degree ; its 
phenomena are, in part, contingent upon our 
development and growth, on our living habitu- 
ally and intelligently in our higher nature, the 
laws of which as communicated to us by other 
minds are in part prophecies of experience not 
yet actual in ourselves. It is the touchstone of 
experience, after all, that tries all things in both 
worlds, and experience in the spiritual world 
may be long delayed ; it is power of mind that 
makes wide generalizations in both ; and the con- 
ception of spiritual law is the most refined as 
perhaps it is the most daring of human thoughts. 
The expansion of the conception of ideal lit- 
erature so as to embrace these other aspects, in 
addition to that of rational knowledge which has 
thus far been exclusively dwelt upon, requires 
us to examine its nature in the regions of beauty, 
joy, and conscience, in which, though generali- 



136 HEAET OF MAN 

zation remains its intellectual method, it does 
not make its direct appeal to the mind. It is 
not enough to show that the creative reason in 
its intellectual process employs that common 
method which is the parent of all true know- 
ledge, and by virtue of its high matter, which 
is the divine order in the soul, holds the pri- 
macy among man's faculties; the story were 
then left half told, and the better part yet to 
come. To enlighten the mind is a great func- 
tion ; but in the mass of mankind there are few 
who are accessible to ideas as such, especially on 
the unworldly side of life, or interested in them. 
Idealism does not confine its service to the 
narrow bounds of intellectuality. It has a 
second and greater office, which is to charm 
the soul. So characteristic of it is this power, 
so eminent and shining, that thence only springs 
the sweet and almost sacred quality breathing 
from the word itself. Idealism, indeed, by the 
garment of sense does not so much clothe 
wisdom as reveal her beauty; so the Greek 
sculptor discloses the living form by the plastic 
folds. Truth made virtue is her work of power, 
and she imposes upon man no harder task than 
the mere beholding of that sight — 



A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 137 

" Virtue in her shape how lovely," 

which since it first abashed the devil in Para- 
dise makes wrong-doers aware of their deform- 
ity, and yet has such subtle and penetrating 
might, such fascination for all finer spirits, 
that they have ever believed with their master, 
Plato, that should truth show her countenance 
unveiled and dwell on earth, all men would 
worship and follow her. 

The images of Plato — those images in which 
alone he could adequately body forth his intui- 
tions of eternity — present the twofold attitude 
of our nature, in mind and heart, toward the 
ideal with vivid distinctness ; and they illus- 
trate the more intimate power of beauty, the 
more fundamental reach of emotion, and the 
richness of their mutual life in the soul. Un- 
der the aspect of truth he likens our know- 
ledge of the ideal to that which the prisoners 
of the cave had of the shadows on the wall; 
under the aspect of beauty he figures our love 
for it as that of the passionate lover. As truth, 
again, — taking up in his earliest days what 
seems the primitive impulse and first thought of 
man everywhere and at all times, — under the 
image of the golden chain let down from the 



138 HEART OF MAN 

throne of the god, he sets forth the heavenly 
origin of the ideal and its descent on earth by- 
divine inspiration possessing the poet as its pas- 
sive instrument ; and later, bringing in now the 
cooperation of man in the act, he again pre- 
sents the ideal as known by reminiscence of 
the soul's eternal life before birth, which is 
only a more defined and rationalized concep- 
tion of inspiration working normally instead 
of by the special act and favour of God. As 
beauty, again, he shows forth the enthusiasm 
evoked by the ideal in the image of the chari- 
oteer of the white and black horses mastering 
them to the goal of love. In these various 
ways the first idealist thought out these dis- 
tinctions of truth and beauty as having a real 
community, though a divided life in the mind 
and heart ; and, as he developed, — and this is 
the significant matter, — the poet in him con- 
trolling his speech told ever more eloquently 
of the charm with which beauty draws the soul 
unto itself, for to the poet beauty is nearer than 
truth. It is the persuasion with which he sets 
forth this charm, rather than his speculation, 
which has fastened upon him the love of later 
ages. He was the first to discern in truth and 



A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 139 

beauty equal powers of one divine being, and 
thus to effect the most important reconciliation 
ever made in human nature. 

So, too, from the other great source of the 
race's wisdom, we are told in the Scriptures that 
though we be fallen men, yet is it left to us to 
lift our eyes to the beauty of holiness and be 
healed; for every ray of that outward loveli- 
ness which strikes upon the eye penetrates to 
the heart of man. Then are we moved, indeed, 
and incited to seek virtue with true desire. 
Prophet and psalmist are here at one with the 
poet and the philosopher in spiritual sensitive- 
ness. At the height of Hebrew genius in the 
personality of Christ, it is the sweet attractive 
grace, the noble beauty of the present life incar- 
nated in his acts and words, the divine reality 
on earth and not, as Plato saw it, in a world 
removed, that has drawn all eyes to the Judean 
hill. The years lived under the Syrian blue 
were a rending of the veil of spiritual beauty 
which has since shone in its purity on men's 
gaze. It is this loveliness which needs only 
to be seen that wins mankind. The emotions 
are enlisted ; and, however we may slight them 
in practice, the habit of emotion more than the 



140 HEART OF MAN 

habit of mind enters into and fixes inward 
character. More men are saved by the heart 
than by the head; more youths are drawn to 
excellence by noble feelings than are coldly 
reasoned into virtue on the ground of gain. 
Some there are among men so colourless in blood 
that they embrace the right on the mere calcu- 
lation of advantage, but they seem to possess 
only an earthly virtue ; some, beholding the 
order of the world, desire to put themselves in 
tune with nature and the soul's law, and these 
are of a better sort; but most fortunate are 
they who, though well-nurtured, find virtue not 
in profit, nor in the necessity of conforming to 
implacable law, but in mere beauty, in the light 
of her face as it first comes to them with ripen- 
ing years in the sweet and noble nature of those 
they grow to love and honour among the living 
and the dead. For this is Achilles made brave, 
that he may stir us to bravery; and surely it 
were little to see the story of Pelops' line if the 
emotions were not awakened, not merely for a 
few moments of intense action of their own 
play, but to form the soul. The emotional glow 
of the creative imagination has been once men- 
tioned in the point that it is often more ab- 



A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 141 

sorbed in the beauty and passion than in the 
intellectual significance of its work ; here, cor- 
respondingly, it is by the heart to which it 
appeals rather than by the mind it illumines 
that it takes hold of youth. 

What, then, is the nature of this emotional 
appeal which surpasses so much in intimacy, 
pleasure, and power the appeal to the intellect ? 
It is the keystone of the inward nature, that 
which binds all together in the arch of life. 
Emotion has some ground, some incitement 
which calls it forth; and it responds with most 
energy to beauty. In the strictest sense beauty 
is a unity of relations of coexistence in coloured 
space and appeals to the eye ; it is in space what 
plot is in time. Like plot, it is deeply engaged 
in the outward world ; it exists in the sensuous 
order, and it shadows forth the spiritual order 
in man only in so far as a fair soul makes the 
body beautiful, as Spenser thought, — the mood, 
the act, and the habit of heroism, love, and the 
like nobilities of man, giving grace to form, 
feature, and attitude. It is primarily an out- 
ward thing, as emotion, which is a phase of 
personality, is an inward thing; what the neces- 
sary sequence of events, the chain of causation, 



142 HEART OF MAN 

is to plot, — its cardinal idea, — that the neces- 
sary harmony of parts, the chime of line and 
colour, is to beauty ; thus beauty is as inevitable 
as fate, as structurally planted in the form and 
colour of the universe as fate is in its temporal 
movement. And as plot has its characteristic 
unity in the impersonal order of God's will, 
shown in time's event, so beauty has its char- 
acteristic unity in the same order shown in 
the visible creation of space. It is true that 
all phenomena are perceived by the mind, and 
are conditioned, as is said, by human modes 
of perception; but within the limits of the 
relativity of all our knowledge, beauty is ini- 
tially a sensuous, not a spiritual, thing, and 
though the structure of the human eye arranges 
the harmonies of line and colour, it is no more 
than as the form of human thought arranges 
cause and effect and other primary relations 
in things; beauty does not in becoming hu- 
manly known cease to be known as a thing 
external, independent of our will, and imposed 
on us from without. It is this outward real- 
ity, the harmony of sense, that sculpture and 
painting add in their types to the interpre- 
tation they otherwise give of personality, and 



A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 143 

often in them this physical element is pre- 
dominant; and in the purely decorative, arts 
it may be exclusive. In landscape, which is in 
the realm of beauty, personality altogether dis- 
appears, unless, indeed, nature be interpreted 
in the mood of the Psalmist as declaring its 
Creator; for the reflection which the presence 
of man may cast upon nature as his shadow is 
not expressive of any true personality there 
abiding, but enters into the scene as the face of 
Narcissus into the brook. The pleasure which 
the mind takes in beauty is only a part of its 
general delight in order of any sort ; and visible 
artistic form as abstracted from the world of 
space is merely a species of organic form and 
is included in it. 

The eye, however, governs so large a part of 
the sensuous field, the idea of beauty as a unity 
of space-relations giving pleasure is so simple, 
and the experience is so usual, that the word 
has been carried over to the life of the more 
limited senses in which analogous phenomena 
arise, differing only in the fact that they exist 
in another sense. Thus in the dominion of the 
ear especially, we speak commonly of the beauty 
of music ; but the life of tlie minor senses. 



144 HEART OF MAN 

touch, taste, and smell, is composed of too 
simple elements to allow of such combination 
as would constitute specific form in ordinary 
apprehension, though in the blind and deaf 
the possibility of high and intelligible com- 
plexity in these senses is proved. Similarly, 
the term is carried over to the invisible and 
inaudible world of the soul within itself, and 
we speak of the beauty of Sidney's act, of 
Romeo's nature, and, in the abstract, of the 
beauty of holiness, and, in a still more re- 
mote sphere, of the beauty of a demonstration 
or a hypothesis ; by this usage we do not so 
much describe the thing as convey the charm 
of the thing. This charm is more intimate and 
piercing to those of sensuous nature who rejoice 
in visible loveliness or in heard melodies ; but 
to the spiritually minded it may be as close and 
penetrating in the presence of what is to them 
dearer than life and light, and is beheld onlj^ by 
the inner eye. It is this charm, whether flow- 
ing from the outward semblance or shining from 
the unseen light, that wins the heart, stirs emo- 
tion, wakes the desire to be one Avith this order 
manifest in truth and beauty, in the spirit and 
the body of things, to go out toward it in love, 



A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 145 

to identify one's being with it as the order 
of life, mortal and immortal; last the will 
quickens, and its effort to make this order pre- 
vail in us and possess us is virtue. The act 
through all its phases is, as has been said, one 
act of the soul, which first perceives, then loves, 
and finally wills. Emotion is the intermediary 
between the divine order and the human will; 
it responds to the beauty of the one and directs 
the choice of the other, and is felt in either 
function as love controlling life in the new 
births of the spirit. 

The emotion, to return to the world of art, 
which is felt in the presence of imaginary 
things is actual in us ; but the attempt is 
made to fix upon it a special character differ- 
entiating it from the emotion felt in the pres- 
ence of reality. One principle of difference 
is sought in the point that in literature, or 
in sculpture and painting, emotion entails no 
action; it has no outlet, and is without prac- 
tical consequences ; the will is paralyzed by the 
fatuity of trying to influence an unreal series of 
events, and in the case of the object of beauty 
in statue or painting by the impossibility of 
possession. The world of art is thus thought 



146 HEART OF MAN 

of as one of pure contemplation, a place of 
escape from the difficulties, the pangs, and the 
incompleteness that beset all action. It is true 
that the imagined world creates special condi- 
tions for emotion, and that the will does not act 
in respect to that world; but does this imply 
any radical difference in the emotion, or does 
it draw after it the consequence that the will 
does not act at all? Checked emotion, emotion 
dying in its own world, is common in life ; and 
so, too, is contemplation as a mode of approach 
to beauty, as in landscape, . or even in human 
figures where there is no thought of any other 
possession than the presence of beauty before 
the eye and soul ; escape, too, into a sphere of 
impersonality, in the love of nature or the 
spectacle of life, is a common refuge. Art 
does not give us new faculties, generate un- 
known habits, or in any way change our nature ; 
it presents to us a new world only, toward 
which our mental behaviour is the same as in 
the rest of life. Why, then, should emotion, 
the most powerful element in life, be regarded 
as a fruitless thing in that ideal art which has 
thus far appeared as a life in purer energy and 
higher intensity of being than life itself? 



A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 147 

The distinction between emotion depicted 
and that felt in response must be kept in mind 
to avoid confusion, for both sorts are present 
at the same time. In literature emotion may- 
be set forth as a phase of the character or as 
a term in the plot ; it may be a single moment 
of high feeling as in a lyric or a prolonged 
experience as in a drama ; it may be shown in 
the pure type of some one passion as in Romeo, 
or in the various moods of a rich nature as in 
Hamlet ; but, whether it be predominant or 
subordinate in any work, it is there treated in 
the same way and for the same purpose as 
other materials of life. What happens when 
literature gives us, for instance, examples of 
moral experience? It informs the mind of the 
normal course of certain lines of action, of the 
inevitable issues of life ; it breeds habits of right 
thinking in respect to these ; it is educative, and 
though we do not act at once upon this know- 
ledge, when the occasion arises we are prepared 
to act. So, when literature presents examples 
of emotional experience, it informs us of the 
nature of emotion, its causes, occasions, and 
results, its value in character, its influence on 
action, the modes of its expression; it breeds 



148 HEART OF MAN 

habits of right thinking in respect to these, and 
is educative ; and, just as in the preceding case, 
though we do not act at once upon this know- 
ledge, when the occasion arises we are prepared 
to act. Concurrently with emotions thus objec- 
tively presented there arises in us a similar 
series of emotions in the beholding; by sym- 
pathy we ourselves feel what is before us, the 
emotions there are also in us in proportion as 
we identify ourselves with the character; or, 
in proportion as our own individuality asserts 
itself by revolt, a contrary series arises of 
hatred, indignation, or contempt, of pity for 
the character or of terror in the feeling that 
what has happened to one may happen to us 
in our humanity. We are taught in a more 
intimate and vital way than through ideas 
alone ; the lesson has entered into our bosoms ; 
we have lived the life. Literature is thus far 
more powerfully educative emotionally than 
intellectually ; and if the poet has worked with 
wisdom, he has bred in us habits of right feel- 
ing in respect to life, he has familiarized our 
hearts with love and anger, with compassion 
and fear, with courage, with resolve, has exer- 
cised us in them upon their proper occasions 



A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 149 

and in their noble expression, has opened to us 
the world of emotion as it ought to be in show- 
ing us that world as it is in men with all its 
possibilities of baseness, ugliness, and destruc- 
tion. This is the service which literature per- 
forms in this field. Imagination shows us a 
scheme of emotion attending the scheme of 
events and presents it in its general connection 
with life, in simple, powerful, and complete ex- 
pression, on the lines of inevitable law in its 
sphere. We go out from the sway of this im- 
agined world, more sensitive to life, more acces- 
sible to emotion, more likely and more capable, 
when the occasion arises, to feel rightly, and to 
carry that feeling out into an act. In all litera- 
ture the knowledge gained objectively, whether 
of action or emotion, is a preparation for life ; 
but this intimate experience of emotion in con- 
nection with an imagined world is a more vital 
preparation, and enters more directly, easily, 
and effectually into men's bosoms. 

Two particular phases of this educative power 
should be specifically mentioned. The objective 
presentation of emotion in literature, as has 
been often observed, corrects the perspective of 
our own lives, as does also the action which it 



150 HEAKT OF MAN 

envelops; and by showing to us emotion in 
intense energy, which by this intensity corre- 
sponds to high type and important plot, and in 
a compass far greater than is normal in ordinary 
life, the portrayal leads us better to bear and 
more justly to estimate the petty trials, the 
vexations, the insignificant experiences of our 
career; we see our lives in a truer relation to 
life in general, and avoid an overcharged feel- 
ing in regard to our private fortune. And, sec- 
ondly, the subjective emotion in ourselves is 
educative in the point that by this outlet we go 
out of ourselves in sympathy, lose our egoism, 
and become one with man in general. This is 
an escape ; but not such as has been previously 
spoken of, for it is not a retreat. There is no 
escape for us, except into the lives of others. 
In nature it is still our own face we see ; and 
before the ideal creations of art we are still 
aware, for all our contemplation, of the inef- 
fable yearning of the thwarted soul, of the 
tender melancholy, the sadness in all beauty, 
which is the measure of our separation there- 
from, and is fundamental in the poetic tempera- 
ment. This is that pain, which Plato speaks of 
— the pain of the growing of the wings of the 



A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 151 

spirit as they unfold. But in passing into the 
lives of other men, in sharing their joys, in 
taking on ourselves the burden of humanity, we 
escape from our self-prison, we leave individ- 
uality behind, we unite with man in common ; 
so we die to ourselves in order to live in lives 
not ours. In literature, sympathy and that 
imagination by which we enter into and com- 
prehend other lives are most trained and devel- 
oped, made habitual, instinctive, and quick. It 
begins to appear, I trust, that ideal art is not 
only one with our nature intellectually, but in 
all ways ; it is the path of the spirit in all 
things. Moreover, emotion is in itself simple; 
it does not need generalization, it is the same 
in all. It is rather a means of universalizing 
the refinements of the intellect, the substantive 
idealities of imagination, by enveloping them in 
an elementary, primitive feeling which they call 
forth. Poetry, therefore, especially deals, as 
Wordsworth pointed out, in the primary affec- 
tions, the elementary passions of mankind; and, 
whatever be its intellectual contents of nature 
or human events, calls these emotions forth as 
the master-spirit of all our seeing. Emotion is 
more fundamental in us than knowledge ; it 



152 HEART OF MAN 

is more powerful in its working; it underlies 
more deliberate and conscious life in the mind, 
and in most of us it rules, as it influences in 
all. It is natural, therefore, to find that its 
operation in art is of graver importance than 
that of the intellectual faculty so far as the 
broad power of art over men is concerned. 

Another special point arises from the fact 
that some emotions are painful, and the ques- 
tion is raised how in literature painful emotions 
become a pleasure. Aristotle's doctrine in re- 
spect to certain of these emotions, tragic pity 
and terror, is well known, though variously in- 
terpreted. He regards such emotions as a dis- 
charge of energy, an exhaustion and a relief, 
in consequence of which their disturbing pres- 
ence is less likely to recur in actual life ; it is 
as if emotional energy accumulated, as vital 
force is stored up and requires to be loosed in 
bodily exercise; but this, except in the point 
that pity and terror, if they do accumulate in 
their particular forms latently, are specifically 
such as it is wise to be rid of, does not differ- 
entiate emotion from the rest of our powers in 
all of which there is a similar pleasure in exer- 
cising, an exhaustion and a relief, with less 



A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 163 

liability of immediate recurrence ; this belongs 
to all expenditure of life. It is not credible to 
me that painful emotion, under the illusions of 
art, can become pleasurable in the common 
sense; what pleasure there is arises only in 
the climax and issue of the action, as in case 
of the drama when the restoration of the order 
that is joyful, beautiful, right, and wise occurs ; 
in other words, in the presence of the final 
poetic justice or reconciliation of the disturbed 
elements of life. But here we come upon 
darker and mysterious aspects of our general 
subject, now to be slightly touched. Tragedy 
dealing with the discords of life must present 
painful spectacles ; and is saved to art only by 
its just ending. Comedy, which similarly deals 
with discords, is endurable only while these 
remain painless. Both imply a defect in order, 
and neither would have any place in a perfect 
world, which would be without pity, fear, or 
humour, all of which proceed from incongruities 
in the scheme. Tragedy and comedy belong 
alike to low civilizations, to wicked, brutal, or 
ridiculous types of character and disorderly 
events, to the confusion, ignorance, and igno- 
minies of mankhid ; the refinement of both is a 



154 HEART OF MAN 

mark of progress in both art and civilization, 
and foretells their own extinction, unless indeed 
the principle of evil be more deeply implanted 
in the universe than we fondly hope; pathos 
and humour, which are the milder and the 
kindlier forms of tragedy and comedy, must 
also cease, for both are equally near to tears. 
But before leaving this subject it is interesting 
to observe how in the Aristotelian scheme of 
tragedy, where it was little thought of, the ap- 
peal is made to man's whole nature as here out- 
lined — the plot replying to reason, the scene 
to the sense of beauty, the katharsis to the emo- 
tions, and poetic justice to the will, which thus 
finds its model and exemplar in the supremacy 
of the moral law in all tragic art. 

This, then, being the nature of the ideal world 
in its whole range commensurate with our be- 
ing, and these the methods of its intellectual 
and emotional appeal, it remains to examine the 
world of art in itself, and especiall}^ its genesis 
out of life. The method by which it is built up 
has long been recognized to be that of imitation 
of the actual, as has been assumed hitherto in 
the statement that all art is concrete. But the 
concrete which art creates is not a copy of the 



A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 155 

concrete of life ; it is more than this. The mind 
takes the particulars of the world of sense into 
itself, generalizes them, and frames therefrom a 
new particular, which does not exist in nature ; 
it is, in fact, nature made perfect in an imagined 
instance, and so presented to the mind's eye, or 
to the eye of sense. The pleasure which imi- 
tation gives has been often and diversely ana- 
lyzed ; it may be that of recognition, or that of 
new knowledge satisfying our curiosity as if 
the original were present, or that of delight in 
the skill of the artist, or that of interest in see- 
ing how his view differs from our own, or that 
of the illusion created for us; but all these 
modes of pleasure exist when the imitation is an 
exact copy of the original, and they do not 
characterize the artistic imitation in any way to 
differentiate its peculiar pleasure. It is that 
element which artistic imitation adds to actual- 
ity, the difference between its created concrete 
and the original out of which that was devel- 
oped, which gives the special delight of art to 
the mind. It is the perfection of the type, the 
intensity of the emotion, the inevitability of 
the plot, — it is the pure and intelligible form 
disclosed in the phases and movement of life, dis- 



156 HEAET OF MAN 

engaged and set apart for the contemplation of 
the mind, — it is the purging of the sensual eye, 
enabling it to see through the mind as the mind 
first saw through it, which renders the world of 
art the new vision it is, the revelation accom- 
plished by the mind for the senses. If the world 
of art were only a reduplication of life, it would 
give only the pleasures that have been men- 
tioned; but its true pleasure is that which it 
yields from its supersensual element, the reason 
which has entered into it with ordering power. 
In the world thus created there will remain the 
imperfections which are due to the limitation of 
the artist, in knowledge, skill, and choice. 

It will be said at once that all these concrete 
representations necessarily fail to realize the 
artist's thought, and are inadequate, inferior in 
exactness, to scientific and philosophic know- 
ledge ; in a measure this is true, and would be 
important if the method of art were demonstra- 
tive, instead of being, as has been said, experi- 
mental and inductive. So, too, all thinkers, 
using the actual world in their processes, are at 
a disadvantage. The figures of the geometer, the 
quantities of the chemist, the measurements of 
the astronomer, are inexact approximations to 



A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 167 

tlieir equivalent in the mind. Art, as an em- 
bodiment in mortal images, is subject to the con- 
ditions of mortality. Hence arises its human 
history, the narrative of its rise, climax, and 
decline in successive ages. The course of art 
is known ; it has been run many times ; it is a 
simple matter. At first art is archaic, the sensi- 
ble form being rudely controlled by the artist's 
hand ; it becomes, in the second stage, classical, 
the form being adequate to the thought, a trans- 
parent expression ; last, it is decadent, the form 
being more than the thought, dwarfing it by 
usurping attention on its own account. The 
peculiar temptation of technique is always to 
elaboration of detail ; technique is at first a 
hope, it becomes a power, it ends in being a 
caprice ; and always as it goes on it loses sight 
of the general in its rendering, and dwells with 
a near eye on the specific. Nor is this attention 
to detail confined to the manner; the hand of 
the artist draws the mind after it, and it is no 
longer the great types of manhood, the impor- 
tant fates of life, the primary emotions in their 
normal course, that are in the foreground of 
thought, but tlie individual is more and more, the 
sensational in plot, the sentimental in feeling. 



158 HEART OF MAN 

This tendency to detail, which is the hall- 
mark of realism, constitutes decline. It arises 
partly from the exhaustion of general ideas, 
from the search for novelty of subject and 
sensation, from the special phenomena of a 
decaying society; but, however manifold may 
be the causes, the fact of decline consists in 
the lessened scope of the matter and the in- 
creased importance of the form, both resulting 
in luxuriant detail. Ideas as they lose gener- 
ality gain in intensity, but in the history of art 
this has not proved a compensation. In Greece 
the three stages are clearly marked both in mat- 
ter and manner, in ^schylus, Sophocles, and 
Euripides ; in England less clearly in Marlowe, 
Shakspere, and Webster. How monstrous in 
the latter did tragedy necessarily become ! yet 
more repulsive in his tenderer companion-spirit. 
Ford. In Greek sculpture, passing into con- 
vulsed and muscular forms or forms of relaxed 
voluptuousness, in Italian painting, in the ro- 
mantic poetry of this century with us, the same 
stages are manifest. Age parallels age. Tenny- 
son in artistic technique is Virgilian, we are 
aware of the style ; but both Virgil and Ten- 
nyson remain classic in matter, in universality, 



A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 159 

and the elemental in man. Browning in sub- 
stance is Euripidean, being individualistic, psy- 
chologic, problematic, with special pleading; 
classicism had departed from him, and left not 
even the style behind. The great opposition 
lies in the subject of interest. Is it to know 
ourselves in others ? Then art which is widely 
interpretative of the common nature of man 
results. Is it to know others as different 
from ourselves ? Then art which is specially 
interpretative of abnormal individuals in ex- 
traordinary environments results. This is the 
opposition between realism and idealism, while 
both remain in the limits of art, as these terms 
are commonly used. It belongs to realism 
to tend to the concrete of narrow application, 
but with fulness of special trait or detail. It 
belongs to idealism to tend to the concrete of 
broad application, but without peculiarity. The 
trivial on the one hand, the criminal on the 
other, in the individual, are the extremes of 
realistic art, while idealism rises to an almost 
superhuman emphasis on that wisdom and 
virtue, and the beauty clothing them, which are 
the goal of a nation's effort. Race-ideas, or 
generalizations of a compact and homogeneous 



160 HEART OF MAN 

people summing up their serious interpretations 
of life, their moral choices, their aspiration and 
hope in the lines of effort that seem to them 
highest, are the necessary matter of idealism; 
when these are expressed they are the Greek 
spirit, the Roman genius, great types of human- 
ity on the impersonal, the national scale. As 
these historic generalizations dissolve in national 
decay, art breaks up in individual portrayal of 
less embracing types; the glorification of the 
Greek man in Achilles yields place to the cor- 
ruptions of the homunculus; and in general 
the literature of nationalitj^ gives way to the 
unmeaning and transitory literature of a society 
interested in its vices, superstitions, and sensa- 
tions. In each age some genius stands at the 
centre of its expression, a shining nucleus amid 
its planetary stars ; such was Dante, such Virgil, 
such Shakspere. Few indeed are the races that 
present the spectacle of a double-sun in their 
history, as the Hebrews in Psalm and Gospel, 
the Greeks in Homer and in Plato. And yet, 
all this enormous range of life and death, this 
flowering in centuries of the human spirit in its 
successive creations, reposes finally on the more 
or less general nature of the concretes used in 



A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 161 

its art, on their broad or narrow truth, on their 
human or individualistic significance. The dif- 
ference between idealism and realism is not 
more than a question which to choose. At the 
further end and last remove, when all art has 
been resolved into a sensation, an effect, lies 
impressionism, which, by its nature, is a single 
phase at a single moment as seen by a single 
being ; but even then, if the mind be normal, if 
the phase be veritable, if the moment be that of 
universal beauty which Faust bade be eternal, 
the artistic work remains ideal; but on the 
other hand, it is usually the eccentric mind, the 
abnormal phase, the beauty of morbid sensation 
that are rendered; and impressionism becomes, 
as a term, the vanishing-point of realism into 
the moment of sense. 

The world of art, to reach its last limitation, 
through all this wide range is in each creation 
passed through the mind of the artist and 
presented necessarily under all the conditions 
of his personality. His nature is a term in the 
process, and the question of imperfection or of 
error, known as the personal equation, arises. 
Individual differences of perceptive power in 
comprehending what is seen, and of narrative 



162 HEAET OF MAN 

skill, or in the plastic and pictorial arts of 
manual dexterity, import this personal element;; 
into all artistic works, the more in proportion 
to the originality of the maker and the fulness 
of his self-expression. In rendering from the 
actual such error is unavoidable, and is practi- 
cally admitted by all who would rather see for 
themselves than take the account of a witness, 
and prefer the original to any copy of it, though 
they thereby only substitute their own error for 
that of the artist. This personal error, how- 
ever, is easily corrected by the consensus of 
human nature. 

The differences in personality go far deeper 
than this common liability of humanity to 
mere mistakes in sight and in representation. 
The isolating force that creates a solitude 
round every man lies in his private experi- 
ence, and results from his original faculties 
and the special conditions of his environment, 
his acquired habits of attending to some things 
rather than others open to him, the choices he 
has made in the past by which his view of 
the world and his interest in it have been de- 
termined. Memory, the mother of the Muses, 
is supreme here ; a man's memory, which 



A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 163 

is the treasury of his chosen delights in life, 
characterizes him, and differentiates his work 
from that of others, because he must draw on 
that store for his materials. Thus a man's 
character, or, what is more profound, his tem- 
perament, acting in conjunction with the mem- 
ory it has built up for itself, is a controlling 
force in artistic work, and modifies it in the 
sense that it presents the universal truth only 
as it exists in his personality, in his apprehen- 
sion of it and its meaning. 

Genius is this power of personality, and 
exists in proportion as the man differs from 
the average in ways that find significant ex- 
pression. This difference may proceed along 
two lines. It may be aberration from normal 
human nature, due to circumstances or to in- 
herent defect or to a thousand causes, but 
existing always in the form of an inward per- 
version approaching disease of our nature ; 
such types of genius are pathological and may 
be neglected. It may, on the other hand, be 
development of normal human nature in high 
power, and it then exists in the form of in- 
ward energy, showing itself in great sensitive- 
ness to outward things, in mental power of 



164 HEAKT OF MAN 

comprehension, in creative force of recombina- 
tion and expression. Of genius of this last 
sort the leaders of the human spirit are made. 
The basis of it is still human faculty dealing 
with the universe — the same faculty, the 
same universe, that are common to mankind; 
but with an extraordinary power, such that it 
can reveal to men at large what they of them- 
selves might never have arrived at, can ad- 
vance knowledge and show forth goals of 
human hope, can in a word guide the race. 
The isolation of such a nature is necessarily 
profound, and intense loneliness has ever been 
a characteristic of genius. The solvent of all 
personality, however, lies at last in this fact 
of a common world and a common faculty for 
all, resulting in an experience intelligible to 
all, even if unshared by them. The humanity 
of genius constitutes its sanity, and is the 
ground of its usefulness ; though it lives in iso- 
lation, it does so only as an advanced outpost 
may ; it expects the advent of the race behind 
and below it, and shows there its signal and 
sounds there its call. Its escape from person- 
ality lies in its identifying itself with the com- 
mon order in which all souls shall finally be 



A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 165 

merged and be at one. The limitations of 
genius are consequently not so much limita- 
tions as the abrogation of limits in the ordinary- 
sense ; its originality of insight, interpretation, 
and expression broadens the human horizons 
and enriches the fields within them; it tells 
us what we may not have known or felt or 
guessed, but what we shall at last understand. 
Thus, as the theory of art is most fixed in 
the doctrine of order, so here it is most flexi- 
ble in the doctrine of personality, through 
which that order is most variously set forth 
and illustrated. Imitation, so far from becom- 
ing a defective or false method because of 
personality, is really made catholic by it, and 
gains the variety and breadth that character- 
izes the artistic world as a whole. 

The element of self which thus enters into 
every artistic work has different degrees of 
importance. In objective art, it is clear that it 
enters valuably in proportion as the universe is 
seized by a mind of right reason, of profound 
penetration, of truthful imagination ; and if 
the work be presented enveloped in a subjective 
mood, while it remains objective in contents, as 
in Virgil the mood pervades the poem so deeply 



166 HEART OF MAN 

as to be a main part of it, then the mood must 
be one of those felt or capable of being felt 
universally, — the profound moods of the medi- 
tative spirit in grand works, the common moods 
of simple joy and sorrow in less serious works. 
In proportion as society develops, whether in 
historic states singly or in the progress of 
mankind, the direct expression of self for its 
own sake becomes more usual ; literature be- 
comes more personal or purely subjective. If 
the poet's private story be one of action, it is 
plain that it has interest only as if it were 
objectively rendered, from its being illustra- 
tive of life in general; so, too, if the felt 
emotion be given, this will have value from 
its being treated as typical ; and, in so far 
as the intimate nature of the poet is variously 
given as a whole in his entire works, it has 
real importance, has its justification in art, 
only in so far as he himself is a high normal 
type of humanity. The truth of the matter is, 
in fact, only a detail of the general proposition 
that in art history has no value of its own as 
such; for the poet is a part of life that is, and 
his nature and career, like that of any character 
or event in history, have no artistic value beyond 



A NEW DEFENCE OE POETRY 167 

their universal significance. In such self-por- 
traiture there may be sometimes the depicting of 
a depraved nature, such as Villon ; but such a 
type takes its place with other criminal types 
of the imagination, and belongs with them in 
another sphere. 

This element of self finds its intense expres- 
sion in lyrical love-poetry, one of the most 
enduring forms of literature because of its ele- 
mentariness and universalitj^ ; but it is also 
found in other parts of the emotional field. 
In seeking concrete material for lyrical use the 
poet may take some autobiographical incident, 
but commonly the world of inanimate nature 
yields the most plastic mould. It is a mar- 
vellous victory of the spirit over matter when 
it takes the stars of heaven and the flowers of 
earth and makes them utter forth its speech, 
less as it seems in words of human language 
than in the pictured hieroglyph and symphonic 
movement of natural things ; for in such poetry 
it is not the vision of nature, however beautiful, 
that holds attention ; it is the colour, form, and 
music of things externalizing, visualizing the 
inward mood, emotion, or passion of the singer. 
Nature is emptied of her contents to become 



168 HEABT OF MAN 

the pure inhabitancy of one human soul. The 
poet's method is that of life itself, which is fir^t 
awakened by the beauty without to thought 
and feeling; he expresses the state evoked by 
that beauty and absorbing it. He identifies 
himself with the objects before him through 
his joy in them, and entering there makes 
nature translucent with his own spirit. 

Shelley's Ode to the West Wind is the emi- 
nent example of such magical power. The 
three vast elements, earth, air, and water, are 
first brought into a union through their connec- 
tion with the west wind ; and, the wind still 
being the controlling centre of imagination, the 
poet, drawing all this limitless and majestic 
imagery with him, by gradual and spontaneous 
approaches identifies himself at the climax of 
feeling with the object of his invocation, — 

" Be thou me, impetuous one ! " 

and thence the poem swiftly falls to its end in 
a lyric burst of personality, in which, while the 
body of nature is retained, there is only a 
spiritual meaning. So Burns in some songs, 
and Keats in some odes, following the same 
method, make nature their own syllables, as of 



A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 169 

some cosmic language. This is the highest 
reach of the artist's power of conveying through 
the concrete image the soul in its pure emo- 
tional life; and in such poetry one feels that 
the whole material world seems lent to man to 
expand his nature and escape from the solitude 
in which he is born to that divine union to 
which he is destined. The evolution of this 
one moment of passion is lyric form, whose 
unity lies in personality exclusively, however 
it may seem to involve the external world 
which is its imagery, — its body lifted from 
the dust, woven of light and air, but alive only 
while the spirit abides there. And here, too, as 
elsewhere, to whatever height the poet may 
rise, it must be one to which man can follow, 
to which, indeed, the poet lifts men. Nor is it 
only nature which thus suffers ^2>ii'it^^lization 
through the stress of imagination interpreting 
life in definite and sensible forms of beauty, 
but the imagery of action also may be similarly 
taken possession of, though this is rare in merely 
lyrical expression. 

The ideal world, then, to present in full sum- 
mary these views, is thus built up, through 
personality in all its richness, by a perfected imi- 



170 HEART OF MAN 

tation of life itself, and is set forth in universal 
unities of relation, causal or formal, to the intel- 
lect in its inward, to the sense of beauty in 
its outward, aspects ; and thereby delighting the 
desire of the mind for lucid and lovely order, it 
generates joy, and thence is born the will to 
conform one's self to this order. If, then, this 
order be conceived as known in its principles 
and in operation in living souls, as existing in 
its completeness on the simplest scale in an 
entire series of illustrative instances but with- 
out multiplicity, — if it be conceived, that is, as 
the model of a world, — that would be to know 
it as it exists to the mind of God ; that would 
be to contemplate the world of ideas as Plato 
conceived it seen by the soul before birth. 
That is the beatific vision. If it be conceived 
in its mortal movement as a developing world 
on earth, that would be to know " the plot of 
God," as Poe called the universe. Art en- 
deavours to bring that vision, that plot, however 
fragmentarily, upon earth. It is a world of 
order clothing itself in beauty, with a charm 
to the soul, — such is our nature, — operative 
upon the will to live. It is preeminently a vis- 
ion of beauty. It is true that this beauty which 



A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 171 

thus wins and moves us seems something added 
by the mind in its great creations rather than 
anything actual in life ; for it is, in fact, height- 
ened and refined from the best that man has 
seen in himself, and it partakes more of hope 
than of memory. Here is that woven robe of 
illusion which is so hard a matter to those who 
live in horizons of the eye and hand. Yet as 
idealism was found on its mental side harmo- 
nious with reason in all knowledge, and on 
its emotional side harmonious with the heart 
in its outgoings, so this perfecting tempera- 
ment that belongs to it and most characterizes 
it, falls in with the natural faith of mankind. 
Idealism in this sense, too, existed in life before 
it passed into literature. The youth idealizes 
the maiden he loves, his hero, and the ends 
of his life ; and in age the old man idealizes 
his youth. Who does not remember some 
awakening moment when he first saw virtue 
and knew her for what she is? Sweet was 
it then to learn of some Jason of the golden 
fleece, some Lancelot of the tourney, some 
dying Sydney of the stricken field. There was 
a poignancy in this early knowledge that shall 
never be felt again; but who knows not that 



172 HEART OF MAN 

such enthusiasm which earliest exercised the 
young heart in noble feelings is the source 
of most of good that abides in us as years 
go on? In such boyish dreaming the soul 
learns to do and dare, hardens and supples 
itself, and puts on youthful beauty; for here 
is its palaestra. Who would blot these from his 
memory? who choke these fountain-heads, re- 
membering how often along life's pathway he 
has thirsted for them? Such moments, too, 
have something singular in their nature, and 
almost immortal, that carries them echoing far 
on into life where they strike upon us in 
manhood at chosen moments when least ex- 
pected; some of them are the real time in 
which we live. It was said of old that great 
men were creative in their souls, and left their 
works to be their race ; these ideal heroes have 
immortal souls for their children, age after age. 
Shall we in our youth, then, in generous emula- 
tion idealize the great of old times, and honour 
them as our fair example of what we most 
would be? Shall we, in our hearts, idealize 
those we love, — so natural is it to believe in 
the perfection of those we love, — and even if 
the time for forgiveness comes, and we show 



A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 173 

them the mercy that our own frailty teaches us 
to exercise, shall we still idealize them, since 
love continues only in the persuasion of perfec- 
tion yet to come, and is the tenderer because 
it comes with struggle? Whether in our acts 
or our emotions shall we give idealism this 
range, and deny it to literature which discloses 
the habits of our daily practice in more perfec- 
tion and with greater beauty? There we find 
the purest types to raise and sustain us ; to 
direct our choice, and reenforce us with that 
emotion, that passion, which most supports the 
will in its effort. There history itself is taken 
up, transformed, and made immortal, the whole 
past of human emotion and action contained 
and shown forth with convincing power. Nor 
is it only with the natural habit of mankind 
that idealism falls in, but with divine command. 
Were we not bid be perfect as our Father in 
heaven is perfect ? And what is that image of 
the Christ, what is that world-ideal, the height 
of human thought, but the work of the creative 
reason, — not of genius, not of the great in 
mind and fortunate in gifts, but of tlie race 
itself, in proud and humble, in saint and sinner, 
in the happy and the wretched, in all the vast 



174 HEART OF MAN 

range of the millions of the dead whose thoughts 
live embodied in that great tradition, — the 
supreme and perfected pattern of mankind? 

Is it nevertheless true that there is falsehood 
in all this ? that men were never such as the 
heart believes them, nor ideal characters able to 
breathe mortal air ? by indulging our emotions, 
do we deceive ourselves, and end at last in 
cynicism or despair? Why, then, should we 
not boldly affirm that the falsehood is rather 
in us, in the defects by which we fail of per- 
fection, in our ignorant error and voluntary 
wrong ? that in the ideal, free as it is from the 
accidental and the transitory, inclusive as it is 
of the common truth, lies, as Plato thought, the 
only reality, the truth which outlasts us all? 
But this may seem a subtle evasion rather than 
a frank answer. Let us rather say that idealism 
is one of the necessary modes of man's faith, 
brings in the future, and assumes the reality 
of that which shall be actual ; that the reality 
it owns is that of the rose in the bud, the oak 
in the acorn, the planet in its fiery mist. I 
believe that ideal character in its perfection is 
potentially in every man who is born into the 
world. We forecast the future in other parts 



A NEW DEFENCE OF POETEY 175 

of life ; why should we not forecast ourselves ? 
Would he not be thought foolish who should 
refuse to embark in great enterprises of trade, 
because he does not already hold the wealth 
to be gained ? The ideal is our infinite riches, 
more than any individual or moment can hold. 
To refuse it is as if a man should neglect his 
estate because he can take but a handful of it 
in his grasp. It is the law of our being to 
grow, and it is a necessity that we should have 
examples and patterns in advance of us, by 
which we can find our way. There is no false- 
hood in such anticipation ; there is only a faith 
in truth instead of a possession of it. Will you 
limit us to one moment of time and place ? will 
you say to the patriot that his country is a geo- 
graphical term ? and when he replies that rather 
is it the life of her sons, will you point him to 
human nature as it seems at the period, to cor- 
ruption, folly, ignorance, strife, and crime, and 
tell him that is our actual America ? Will he 
not rather say that his America is a great past, 
a future whose beneficence no man can sum ? 
Is there any falsehood in this ideal country that 
men have ever held precious ? Did Pericles lie 
in his great oration, and Virgil in his noble 



176 HEART OF MAN 

poem, and Dante in his fervid Italian lines? 
And as there are ideals of country, so also ,oi 
men, of the soldier, the priest, the king, the 
lover, the citizen j and beside each of us does 
there not go one who mourns over our fall 
and pities us, gladdens in our virtue, and shall 
not leave us till we die ; an ideal self, who is 
our judgment? and if it be yet answered that 
this in truth is so, and might be borne but for 
the errors of the idealizing temperament, shall 
we not reply that the quack does not discredit 
the art of medicine, nor the demagogue the art 
of politics, and no more does the fool in all his 
motley the art of literature. 

Must I, however, come back to my answer, 
and meet those who aver that however stimu- 
lating idealism is to the soul, yet it must be 
remembered that in the world at large there is 
nothing corresponding to ideal order, to poetic 
ethics, and that to set these forth as the su- 
premacy of what ought to be is to misrepresent 
life, to raise expectations in youth never to be 
realized, to pervert practical standards, and in 
brief to make a false start that can be fruit- 
ful only in error, in subsequent suffering of 
mind, and with material disadvantage ? I must 



A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 177 

be frank : I own that I can perceive in Nature 
no moral order, that in her world there is no 
knowledge of us or of our ideals, and that in 
general her order often breaks upon man's life 
with mere ruin, irrational and pitiful ; and I ac- 
knowledge, also, the prominence of evil in the 
social, and its invasion in the individual, life 
of man. But, again, were we so situated that 
there should be no external divine order ap- 
parent to our minds, were justice an accident 
and mercy the illusion of wasted prayer, there 
would still remain in us that order whose work- 
ings are known within our own bosom, that law 
which compels us to be just and merciful in 
order to lead the life that we recognize to be 
best, and the whole imperative of our ideal, 
which, if we fail to ourselves, condemns us, 
irrespective of what future attends us in the 
world. Ideal order as the mind knows it, the 
mind must strive to realize, or stand dis- 
honoured in its own forum. Within us, at 
least, it exists in hope and somewhat in reality, 
and following it in our effort, though we come 
merely to a stoical idea of the just man on 
whom the heavens fall, we should yet be nobler 
than the power that made us souls betrayed. 



178 HEART OF MAN 

But there is no such difference between the 
world as it is and the world as ideal art pre- 
sents it. 

What, then, is the difference between art and 
nature? Art is nature regenerate, made per- 
fect, suffering the new birth into what ought to 
be ; an ordered and complete world. But this 
is the vision of art as the ultimate of good. 
Idealism has also another world, of which 
glimpses have already appeared in the course 
of this argument, though in the background. 
In the intellectual sphere evil is as subject to 
general statement as is good, and there is in the 
strict sense an idealization of evil, a universal 
statement of it, as in Mephistopheles, or in 
more partial ways in lago, Macbeth, Richard 
III. In the emotional sphere also there is the 
throb of evil, felt as diabolic energy and pre- 
sented as the element in which these characters 
have their being. Even in the sphere of the 
will, who shall say that man does not know- 
ingly choose evil as his portion? So, too, as 
the method of idealism in the world of the good 
tends to erect man above himself, the same 
generalizing method in the world of the evil 
tends to degrade human nature below itself; 



A NEW DEFENCE OF POETEY 179 

the extremes of the process are the divine and 
the devilish ; both transcend life, but are devel- 
oped out of it. The difference between these 
two poles of ideality is that the order of one is 
an order of life, that of the other an order of 
death. Between these two is the special prov- 
ince of the human will. What literature, what 
all art, presents is not the ultimate of good or 
the ultimate of evil separately; it is, taking 
into account the whole range, the mixed world 
becoming what it ought to be in its evolution 
from what it is, and the laws of that progress. 
Hence tragedy on the one hand and comedy, or 
more broadly humour, on the other hand, have 
their great place in literature ; for they are 
forms of the intermediate world of conflict. I 
speak of the spiritual world of man's will. We 
may conceive of the world optimistically as 
a place in which all shall issue in good and 
nothing be lost; or as a place in which, by 
alliance with or revolt from the forces of life, 
the will in its voluntary and individual action 
may save or lose the soul at its choice. We 
may think of God as conserving all, or as 
permitting hell, which is death. We do not 
know. But as shown to us in imagination, 



180 HEAKT OF MAN 

idealism, which is the race's dream of truth, 
hovers between these two worlds known to us 
in tendency if not in conclusion, — the world 
of salvation on the one hand, in proportion as the 
order of life is made vital in us, the world of 
damnation on the other hand, in proportion as 
the order of death prevails in our will ; but tht' 
main effort of idealism is to show us the war 
between the two, with an emphasis on the be- 
coming of the reality of beauty, joy, reason, and 
virtue in us. Not that prosperity follows right- 
eousness, not that poverty attends wickedness, 
in worldly measure, but that life is the gift of a 
right will is her message ; how we, striving for 
eternal life, may best meet the chances and the 
bitter fates of mortal existence, is her brooding 
care; ideal characters, or those ideal in some 
trait or phase, in the midst of a hostile environ- 
ment, are her fixed study. So far is idealism 
from ignoring the actual state of man that it 
most affirms its pity and evil by setting them 
in contrast with what ought to be, by showing 
virtue militant not only against external enemies 
but those inward weaknesses of our mortality 
with its passion and ignorance, which are our 
most undermining and intimate foes. Here is 



A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 181 

no false world, but just that world which is our 
theatre of action, that confused struggle, rep- 
resented in its intelligible elements in art, that 
world of evil, implicit in us and the universe, 
which must be overcome ; and this is revealed 
to us in the ways most profitable for our instruc- 
tion, who are bound to seek to realize the good 
through all the strokes of nature and the folly 
and sin of men. Ideal literature in its broad 
compass, between its opposed poles of good and 
evil, is just this : a world of order emerging 
from disorder, of beauty and wisdom, of virtue 
and joy, emerging from the chaos of things that 
are, in selected and typical examples. 

It follows from this that what remains in 
the world of observation in personality or ex- 
perience, whether good or evil, whether par- 
ticular or general, not yet coordinated in 
rational knowledge as a whole, all for which 
no solution is found, all that cannot be or has 
not been made intelligible, must be the sub- 
ject-matter of realism in the exact use of that 
term. This must be recorded by literature, or 
admitted into it, as matter-of-fact which is to 
the mind still a problem. Earthly mystery 
therefore is the special sphere of realism. 



182 HEAKT OE MAN 

The borderland of the unknown or the irre- 
ducible is its realm. This old residuum, thi^s 
new material, is not yet capable of art. Hence, 
too, realism in this sense characterizes ages of 
expansion of knowledge such as ours. The 
new information which is the fruit of our wide 
travel, of our research into the past, has en- 
larged the problem of man's life by showing 
us both primitive and historical humanity in 
its changeful phases of progress working out 
the beast ; and this new interest has been reen- 
forced by the attention paid, under influences 
of democracy and philanthropy, to the lower 
and baser forms of life in the masses under 
civilization, which has been a new revelation of 
persistent savagery in our midst. Here realism 
illustrates its service as a gatherer of knowledge 
which may hereafter be reduced to orderliness 
by idealistic processes, for idealism is the organ- 
izer of all knowledge. But apart from this 
incoming of facts, or of laws not yet harmo- 
nized in the whole body of law, for which we 
may have fair hope that a synthesis will be 
found, there remains forever that residuum of 
which I spoke, which has resisted the intelli- 
gence of man, age after age, from the first 



A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 183 

throb of feeling, the first ray of thought ; that 
involuntary evil, that unmerited suffering, that 
impotent pain, — the human debris of the social 
process, — which is a challenge to the power 
of God, and a cry to the heart of man that 
broods over it in vain, yet cannot choose but 
hear. In this region the near affinity of realism 
to pessimism, to atheism, is plain enough; its 
necessary dealing with the base, the brutal, 
the unredeemed, the hopeless darkness of the 
infamies of heredity, criminal education, and 
successful malignity, eating into the being as 
well as controlling the fortune of their victims, 
is manifest; and what answer has ever been 
found to the interrogation they make? It is 
not merely that particular facts are here irrec- 
oncilable ; but laws themselves are discernible, 
types even not of narrow application, which 
have not been brought into any relation with 
what I have named the divine order. Millions 
of men in thousands of years are included in 
this holocaust of past time, — eras of savagery, 
Assyrian civilizations. Christian butcheries, the 
Czar yet supreme, the Turk yet alive. 

And how is it at the other pole of mystery, 
where life rises into a heavenly vision of eter- 



184 HEABT OF MAN 

nities of love to come? There is no place for 
realism here, where observation ceases and otir 
only human outlook is by inference from prin- 
ciples and laws of the ideal world as known 
to us; yet what problems are we aware of? 
Must, — to take the special problem of art, — 
must the sensuous scheme of life persist, since 
of it warp and woof are woven all our possi- 
bilities of communication, all our capabilities 
of knowledge? it is our language and our 
memory alike. Must God be still thought of 
in the image of man, since only in terms of 
our humanity can we conceive even divine 
things, whether in forms of mortal pleasure as 
the Greeks framed their deities, or in shapes of 
spiritual bliss as Christians fashion saint, angel, 
and archangel ? These are rather philosophical 
problems. But in art, as at the realistic end 
of the scale, we admit the portraiture, as a 
part of life, of the bestial, the cruel, the un- 
forgiven, and feel it debasing, so must we at 
the idealistic end admit the representation of 
the celestial after human models, and feel it, 
even in Milton and in Dante, minimizing. The 
mysticism of the borderland at its supreme is 
a hope ; at its nadir, it is a fear. We do not 



A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 185 

know. But within the narrow range of the 
intelligible and ordered world of art, which 
has been achieved by the creative reason of 
civilized man in his brief centuries and along 
the narrow path from Jerusalem and Athens 
to the western world, we do know that for 
the normal man born into its circle of light 
the order of life is within our reach, the order 
of death within reach of us. Shut within 
these limits of the victory of our intellect and 
the upreaching of our desires and the warfare 
of our will, we assert in art our faith that the 
divine order is victorious, that the righteous 
man is not forsaken, that the soul cannot suffer 
wrong either from others or from nature or 
from God, — that the evil principle cannot pre- 
vail. It is faith, springing from our experience 
of the working of that order in us ; it transcends 
knowledge, but it grows with knowledge ; and 
ideal literature asserts this faith against nature 
and against man in all their deformity, as the 
centre about which life revolves so far as it 
has become subject to rational knowledge, to 
beautiful embodiment, to joyful being, to the 
will to live. 

Can the faith of which idealism is the holder 



186 HEART OF MAN 

of the keys, the faith as nigh to the intellect 
as to the heart, to the senses as to the spirit, 
exceed even this limit, and affirm that if man 
were perfect in knowledge and saw the universe 
as we believe God sees it, he would behold it 
as an artistic whole even now? Would it be 
that beatific vision, revolving like God's kalei- 
doscope, momentarily falling at each new ar- 
rangement into the perfect unities of art? and 
is our world of art, our brief model of such a 
world in single examples of its scheme, only 
a way of limiting the field to the compass of 
human faculties that we may see within our 
capacities as God sees, and hence have such 
faith? Is art after all a lower creation than 
nature, a concession to our frail powers? Has 
idealism such optimistic reach as that? Or 
must we see the evil principle encamped here, 
confusing truth, deforming beauty, depraving 
joy, deflecting the will, with wages of death 
for its victims, and the hell of final destruction 
spreading beneath its sway? so that the world 
as it now is cannot be thought of as the will of 
God exercised in Omnipotence, but a human 
opportunity of union with or separation from the 
ideal order in conflict with the order of death. 



A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 187 

I recall Newman's picture : " To consider the 
world in its length and breadth, its various his- 
tory, the many races of men, their starts, their 
fortunes, their mutual alienation, their conflicts, 
and then their ways, habits, governments, forms 
of worship ; their enterprises, their aimless 
courses, their random achievements and ac- 
quirements, the impotent conclusion of long- 
standing facts, the tokens so faint and broken 
of a superintending design, the blind evolution 
of what turn out to be great powers or truths, 
the progress of things, as if from unreasoning 
elements, not toward final causes, the great- 
ness and littleness of man, his far-reaching 
aims, his short duration, the curtain hung over 
his futurity, the disappointments of life, the 
defeat of good, the success of evil, physical 
pain, mental anguish, the prevalence and in- 
tensity of sin, the pervading idolatries, the cor- 
ruptions, the dreary hopeless irreligion, that 
condition of the whole race, so fearfully yet 
exactly described in the Apostle's words, ' hav- 
ing no hope and without God in the world,' — 
all this is a vision to dizzy and appall ; and in- 
flicts upon the mind the sense of a profound 
mystery which is absolutely beyond human 



188 HEART OF MAN 

solution/' In the face of such a world, even 
when partially made intelligible in ideal art, 
dare we assert that fatalistic optimism which 
would have it that the universe is in God's eyes 
a perfect world ? I can find no warrant for it in 
ideal art, though thence the ineradicable effort 
arises in us to win to that world in the convic- 
tion that it is not indifferent in the sight of 
heaven whether we live in the order of life or 
that of death, in the faith that victory in us is a 
triumph of that order itself which increases and 
prevails in us, is a bringing of Christ's kingdom 
upon earth. Art rather becomes in our mind 
a function of the world's progress, and were its 
goal achieved would cease ; for life would then 
itself be one with art, one with the divine order. 
So much of truth there is in Ruskin's statement 
that art made perfect denies progress and is its 
ultimate. But perfection in life, as ideal art 
presents it, is a prophecy which enlists us as 
soldiers militant in its fulfilment. Its optimism 
is that of the issue, and may be that of the pro- 
cess ; but it surely is not that of the state that 
now is in the world. 

It thus appears more and more that art is 
educative; it is the race's foreknowledge of 



A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 189 

what may be, of the objects of effort and the 
methods of their attainment under mortal con- 
ditions. The difficulty of men in respect to 
it is the lax power they have to see in it the 
truth, as contradistinguished from the fact, the 
continuous reality of the things of the mind in 
opposition to the accidental and partial reality 
of the things of actuality. They think of it as 
an imagined instead of as the real world, the 
model of that which is in the evolution of that 
which ought to be. In history the climaxes of 
art have always outrun human realization; its 
crests in Greece, Italy, and England are crests 
of the never-attained; but they still make on in 
their mass to the yet rising wave, which shall 
be of mankind universal, if, indeed, in the cos- 
mopolitan civilization which we hope for, the 
elements of the past, yet surviving from the 
accomplishment of single famous cities and 
great empires, shall be blended in a world-ideal, 
expressing the spiritual uplifting to God of the 
reconciled and unified nations of the earth. 

There remains but one last resort ; for it will 
yet be urged that the impossibility of any scien- 
tific knowledge of the spiritual order is proved 
by the transience of the ideals of the past ; one 



190 HEART OF MAN 

is displaced by another, there is no permanence 
in them. It is true that the concrete world, 
which must be employed by art, is one of sense, 
and necessarily imports into the form of art its 
own mortality ; it is, even in art, a thing that 
passes away. It is also true that the world of 
knowledge, which is the subject-matter of art, 
is in process of being known, and necessarily 
imports into the contents of art its errors, its 
hypotheses, its imperfections of every kind ; it is 
a thing that grows more and more, and in grow- 
ing sheds its outworn shells, its past body. Let 
us consider the form and the contents separately. 
The element of mortality in the form is included 
in the transience of imagery. The poet uses the 
world as he knows it, and reflects in successive 
ages of literature the changing phases of civili- 
zation. The shepherd, the tiller of the soil, the 
warrior, the trader yield to him their language 
of the earth, the battle, and the sea ; from the 
common altar he learns the speech of the gods ; 
the elemental aspects of nature, the pursuits 
of men, and what is believed of the supernatural 
are the great storehouses of imagery. The fact 
that it is at first a living act or habit that the 
poet deals with, gives to his work that original 



A NEW DEFENCE OE POETRY 191 

vivacity, that direct sense of actuality, of con- 
temporaneousness, which characterizes early 
literatures, as in Homer or the Song of Roland: 
even the marvellous has in them the reality of 
being believed. This imagery, however, grows 
remote with the course of time; it becomes 
capable of holding an inward meaning without 
resistance from too high a feeling of actuality; 
it becomes spiritualized. The process is the 
same already illustrated in lyric form as an ex- 
pression of personality ; but here man universal 
enters into the image and possesses it imperson- 
ally on the broad human scale. The pastoral 
life, for example, then yields the forms of art 
which hold either the simple innocence of 
happy earthly love, as in Daphnis and Chloe, 
or the natural grief of elegy made beautiful, as 
in Bion's dirge, or the shepherding of Christ in 
his church on earth, as in many an English 
poet ; the imagery has unclothed itself of actu- 
ality and shows a purely spiritual body. 

This growing inwardness of art is a main 
feature of literary history. It is illustrated on 
the grand scale by the imagery of war. In the 
beginning war for its own sake, mere fighting, 
is the subject ; then war for a cause, which en- 



192 HEART OF MAN 

nobles it beyond the power of personal prowess 
and justifies it as an element in national life; 
next, war for love, which refines it and builds 
the paradox of the deeds of hate serving the 
will of courtesy; last, war for the soul's salva- 
tion, which is unseen battle within the breast. 
Achilles, ^neas, Lancelot, the Red Cross 
Knight are the terms in this series ; they mark 
the transformation of the most savage act of 
man into the symbol of his highest spiritual 
effort. Nature herself is subject to this inward- 
ness of art ; at first merely objective as a condi- 
tion, and usually a hostile, or at least dangerous, 
condition of human life, she becomes the wit- 
ness to omnipotent power in illimitable beauty 
and majesty, its infinite unknowableness, and 
its tender care for all creatures, as in the 
Scriptures; and at last the words of our Lord 
concentrate, in some simple flower, the pro- 
foundest of moral truths, — that the beauty of 
the soul is the gift of God, out of whose eternal 
law it blossoms and has therein its ever living 
roots, its air and light, its inherent grace and 
sweetness : " Consider the lilies of the field, 
how they grow : they toil not, neither do they 
spin : and yet I say unto you that even Solomon 



A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 193 

in all his glory was not arrayed like one of 
these. Shall he not much more clothe you, O 
ye of little faith?" Such is the normal devel- 
opment of all imagery; its actuality limits it, 
and in becoming remote it grows flexible. It is 
only by virtue of this that man can retain the 
vast treasures of race-imagination, and continue 
to use them, such as the worlds of mythology, 
of chivalry, and romance. The imagery is, in 
truth, a background, whose foreground is the 
ideal meaning. Thus even fairyland, and the 
worlds of heaven and hell, have their place in 
art. The actuality of the imagery is in fact 
irrelevant, just as history is in the idealization 
of human events! Its transience, then, cannot 
matter, except in so far as it loses intelligibility 
through changes of time, place, and custom, 
and becomes a dead language. It follows that 
that imagery which keeps close to universal 
phases of nature, to pursuits always necessary 
in human life, and to ineradicable beliefs in 
respect to the supernatural, is most permanent 
as a language ; and here art in its most im- 
mortal creations returns again to its omni- 
present character as a thing of the common 
lot. 



194 HEART OF MAN 

The transience of the contents of art may be 
of two kinds. There is a passing away of error, 
as there is in all knowledge, but such a loss 
need not detain attention. What is really in 
issue is the passing away of the authority of 
precept and example fitted to one age but not 
to another, as in the case of the substitution of 
the ideal of humility for that of valour, owing 
to a changed emphasis in the scale of virtues. 
The contents of art, its general ideals, repro- 
duce the successive periods of our earth-history 
as a race, by generalizing each in its own age. 
A parallel exists in the subject-matter of the 
sciences; astronomy, geology, paleontology are 
similar statements of past phases of the evolu- 
tion of the earth, its aspects in successive 
stages. Or, to take a kindred example, just as 
the planets in their order set forth now the 
history of our system from nascent life to com- 
plete death as earths, so these ideals exhibit 
man's stages from savagery to such culture as 
has been attained. They have more than a de- 
scriptive and historical significance ; they retain 
practical vitality because the unchangeable ele- 
ment in the universe and in man's nature is in 
the main their subject-matter. It is not merely 



A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 195 

that the child repeats in his education, in some 
measure at least, the history of the race, and 
hence must still learn the value of bravery and 
humility in their order ; nor that in the mass of 
men many remain ethically and emotionally in 
the characteristic stages of past culture; but 
these various ideals of what is admirable have 
themselves identical elements, and in those 
points in which they differ respond to native 
varieties of human capacity and temperament. 
The living principles of Hebrew, Greek, Roman, 
and Christian thought and feeling are at work 
in the world, still formative ; it is only by such 
vitality that their results in art truly survive. 
There has been an expansion of the field, and 
some rearrangement within it; but the evolu- 
tion of human ideals has been, in our civiliza- 
tion, the growth of one spirit out of its dead 
selves carrying on into each reincarnation the 
true life that was in the form it leaves, and 
which is immortal. The substance in each 
ideal, its embodiment of what is cardinal in 
all humanity, remains integral. The alloy of 
mortality in a woik of art lies in so much of 
it as was limited in truth to time, place, coun- 
try, race, religion, its specific and contemporary 



196 HEAET OF MAN 

part; so great is this in detail that a strong 
power of historical imagination, the power to 
rebuild past conditions, is a main necessity of 
culture, like the study of a dead language; 
an interpretative faculty, the power to trans- 
late into terms of our knowledge what was 
stated in terms of different beliefs, must go 
with this ; and also a corrective power, if the 
work is to be truly useful and enter into our 
lives with effect. Such an alloy there is in 
nearly all great works even ; much in Homer, 
something in Virgil, a considerable part of 
Dante, and an increasing portion in Milton 
have this mixture of death in them ; but if by 
keeping to the primary, the permanent, the 
universal, they have escaped the natural body 
of their age, the substance of the work is still 
living; they have achieved such immortality 
as art allows. They have done so, not so much 
by the personal power of their authors as by 
their representative character. These ideal 
works of the highest range, which embody in 
themselves whole generations of effort and rise 
as the successive incarnations of human imagi- 
nation, are products of race and state, of world- 
experience and social personality ; they differ, 



A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 197 

race from race, civilization from civilization, 
Hebrew or Greek, Pagan or Christian, just as 
on the individual scale persons differ ; and they 
are solved, as personality in its individual form 
is solved, in the element of the common reason, 
the common nature in the world and man, 
which they contain, — in man, 

" Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless " ; 

in the unity of the truth of his spirit they are 
freed from mortality, they are mutually intel- 
ligible and interchangeable, they survive, — 
racial and secular states and documents of a 
spiritual evolution yet going on in all its stages 
in the human mass, still barbarous, still pagan, 
still Christian, but an evolution which at its 
highest point wastes nothing of the past, holds 
all its truth, its beauty, its vital energy, in a 
forward reach. 

The nature of the changes which time brings 
may best be illustrated from the epic, and thus 
the opposition of the transient and permanent 
elements in art be, perhaps, more clearly 
shown. Epic action has been defined as the 
working out of the Divine will in society ; 
hence it requires a crisis of humanity as its 



198 HEART OF MAN 

subject, it involves the conflict of a higher 
with a lower civilization, and it is conducted 
by means of a double plot, one in heaven, the 
other on earth. These are the characteris- 
tic epic traits. In dealing with ideas of such 
importance, the poets in successive eras of civili- 
zation naturally found much adaptation to new 
conditions necessary, and met with ever fresh 
difficulties; the result is a many-sided epic 
development. The idea of the Divine will, the 
theory of its operation, and the conception of 
society itself were all subject to change. Epics 
at first are historical; but, sharing with the 
tendency of all art toward inwardness of mean- 
ing, they become purely spiritual. The one 
thing that remains common to all is the notion 
of a struggle between a higher and a lower, 
overruled by Providence. They have two sub- 
jects of interest, one the cause, the other the 
hero through whom the cause works; and 
between these two interests the epic hovers, sel- 
dom if ever identifying them and yet preserv- 
ing their dual reality. 

The Iliad has all the traits that have been 
mentioned, but society is still loose enough in 
its bonds to give the characters free play ; it is, 



A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 199 

in the main, a hero-epic. The jEneid, on the 
contrary, exhibits the enormous development 
of the social idea; its subject is Roman do- 
minion, which is the will of Zeus, localized in 
the struggle with Carthage and with Turnus, 
but felt in the poem pervasively as the general 
destiny of Rome in its victory over the world ; 
and this interest is so overpowering as to make 
^neas the slave of Jove and almost to extin- 
guish the other characters; it is a state-epic. 
So long as the Divine will was conceived as 
finding its operation through deities similar to 
man, the double plot presented little difficulty ; 
but in the coming of Christian thought, even 
with its hierarchies of angels and legions of 
devils, the interpretation became arduous. In 
the Jerusalem Delivered the social conflict 
between Crusader and infidel is clear, the 
historical crisis in the wars of Palestine is 
rightly chosen, but the machinery of the heav- 
enly plot is weakened by the presence of magic, 
and is by itself ineffectual in inspiring a true 
belief. So in the Lusiads, while the conflict 
and the crisis, as shown in the national energy 
of colonization in the East, are clear, the 
machinery of the heavenly plot frankly reverts 



200 HEAHT Ot MAN 

to mythologic and pagan forms and loses all 
credibility. 

In the Paradise Lost arises the spiritual epic, 
but still historically conceived; the crisis chosen, 
which is the fall of man in Adam, is the most 
important conceivable by man ; the powers en- 
gaged are the superior beings of heaven and hell 
in direct antagonism ; but here, too, the machin- 
ery of the heavenly plot is handled with much 
strain, and, however strongly supported by the 
Scriptures, has little convincing power. The 
truth is that the Divine will was coming to be 
conceived as implicit in society, being Provi- 
dence there, and operating in secret but normal 
ways in the guidance of events, not by special 
and interfering acts ; and also as equally impli- 
cit in the individual soul, the iniGluence of the 
Spirit, and working in the ways of spiritual law. 
One change, too, of vast importance was an- 
nounced by the words " The Kingdom of Heaven 
is within you." This transferred the very scene 
of conflict, the theatre of spiritual warfare, from 
an external to an internal world, and the social 
significance of such individual battle lay in its 
being typical of all men's lives. The Faerie 
Queene, the most spiritual poem in all ways in 



A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 201 

English, is an epic in essence, though its action 
is developed by a revolution of the phases of 
the soul in succession to the eye, and not by the 
progress of one main course of events. The 
conflict of the higher and the lower under 
Divine guidance in the implicit sense is there 
shown ; the significance is for mankind, though 
not for a society in its worldly fortunes; but 
there is little attempt to externalize the heav- 
enly power in specific action in superhuman 
form>.^ though in mortal ways the good knights, 
and especially Arthur, shadow it forth. The 
celestial plot is humanized, and the poem be- 
comes a hero-epic in almost an exclusive way ; 
though the knight's achievement is also an 
achievement of God's will, the interest lies in 
the Divine power conceived as man's moral 
victory. In the Idyls of the King there are 
several traits of the epic. There is the central 
idea of the conflict between the higher and 
lower, both on the social and the individual 
side; the victory of the Round Table would 
have meant not only pure knights but a regen- 
erate state. Here, however, the externalization 
of the Divine will in the Holy Grail, and, as 
in the Christian epic generally, its confusion on 



202 HEART OF MA:P^ 

the marvellous side with a world of enchant- 
ment passing here into the sensuous sphere of 
Merlin, are felt to be inadequate. The war of 
" soul with sense " was the subject-matter, as 
was Spenser's ; the method of revolution of its 
phases was also Spenser's; but the two poems 
differ in the point that Spenser's knight wins, 
but Tennyson's king loses, so far as earth is 
concerned ; nor can it be fairly pleaded that as 
in Milton Adam loses, yet the final triumph of 
the cause is known and felt as a divine issue of 
the action though outside the poem, so Arthur 
is saved to the ideal by virtue of the faith he 
announces in the New Order coming on, for it 
is not so felt. The touch of pessimism invades 
the poem in many details, but here at its heart ; 
for Arthur alone of all the heroes of epic in his 
own defeat drags down his cause. He is the hero 
of a lost cause, whose lance will never be raised 
again in mortal conflict to bring the kingdom 
of Christ on earth, nor its victory be declared 
except as the echo of a hope of some miraculous 
and merciful retrieval from beyond the barriers 
of the world to come. But in showing the 
different conditions of the modern epic, its 
spirituality, its difficulties of interpreting in 



A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 203 

sensuous imagery the working of the Divine 
will, its relaxed hold on the social movement 
for which it substitutes man's universal nature, 
and the mist that settles round it in its latest 
example, sufficient illustration has been given 
of the changes of time to which idealism is sub- 
ject, and also of the essential truth surviving in 
the works of the past, which in the epics is the 
vision of how the ends of God have been accom- 
plished in the world and in the soul by the 
union of divine grace with heroic will, — the 
interpretation and glorification of history and 
of man's single conflict in himself age after age, 
asserting through all their range the supremacy 
of the ideal order over its foes in the entire 
race-life of man. 

Out of these changes of time, in response to 
the varying moods of men in respect to the 
world they inhabit, arise those phases of art 
which are described as classical and roman- 
tic, words of much confusion. It has been at- 
tempted to distinguish the latter as having an 
element of remoteness, of surprise, of curiosity ; 
but to me, at least, classical art has the same 
remoteness, the same surprise, and answers the 
same curiosity as romantic art. If I were to 



204 HEART OF MAN 

endeavour to oppose them I should say that 
classical art is clear, it is perfectly grasped in 
form, it satisfies the intellect, it awakes an emo- 
tion absorbed by itself, it definitely guides the 
will; romantic art is touched with mystery, it 
has richness and intricacy of form not fully com- 
prehended, it suggests more than it satisfies, it 
stirs an unconfined and wandering emotion, it 
invigorates an adventurous will; classicism is 
whole in itself and lives in the central region, 
the white light, of that star of ideality which is 
the light of our knowledge; romanticism bor- 
ders on something else, — the rosy corona round 
about our star, carrying on its dawning power 
into those unknown infinities which embosom 
the spark of life. The two have always existed 
in conjunction, the romantic element in ancient 
literature being large. But owing to the dis- 
closure of the world to us in later times, to the 
deeper sense of its mysteries which are our 
bounding horizons round about, and especially 
to the impulse given to emotion by the opening 
of the doors of immortality by Christianity to 
thought, revery, and dream, to hope and effort, 
the romantic element has been more marked in 
modern art, has in fact characterized it, being 



A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 205 

fed moreover by the ever increasing inwardness 
of human life, the greater value and opportunity 
of personality in a free and high civilization, and 
by the uncertainty, confusion, and complexity of 
such masses of human experience as our obser- 
vation now^ controls. The romantic temper is 
inevitable in men whose lives are themselves 
thought of as, in form, but fragments of the life 
to come, which shall find their completion an 
eternal task. It is the natural ally of faith which 
it alone can render with an infinite outlook; 
and it is the complement of that mystery which 
is required to supplement it, and which is an 
abiding presence in the habit of the sensitive 
and serious mind. Yet in classical art the defi- 
nite may still be rendered, the known, the con- 
quered. Idealism has its finished world therein ; 
in romanticism it has rather its prophetic work. 
Such, then, as best I can state it in brief and 
rapid strokes, is the world of art, its methods, 
its appeals, its significance to mankind. Ideal- 
ism, so presented, is in a sense a glorification of 
the commonplace. Its realm lies in the com- 
mon lot of men; its distinction is to embrace 
truth for all, and truth in its universal forms of 
experience and personality, the primary, element- 



206 HEART OF MAN 

ary, equally shared fates, passions, beliefs of the 
race. Shakspere, our great example, as Cole- 
ridge wisely said, " kept in the highway of life." 
That is the royal road of genius, the path of 
immortality, the way ever trodden by the great 
who lead. I have ventured to speak at times of 
religious truth. What is the secret of Christ's 
undying power ? Is it not that he stated uni- 
versal truth in concrete forms of common expe- 
rience so that it comes home to all men's bosoms ? 
Genius is supreme in proportion as it does that, 
and becomes the interpreter of every man who 
is born into the world, makes him know his 
brotherhood with all, and the incorporation of 
his fate in the scheme of law, and ideal achieve- 
ment under it, which is the common ground of 
humanity. Ideal literature is the treasury of 
such genius in the past ; here, as I said in the 
beginning, the wisdom of the soul is stored; 
and art, in all its forms, is immortal only in so 
far as it has done its share in this same labour of 
illumination, persuasion, and command, forecast- 
ing the spirit to be, companioning the spirit that 
is, sustaining us all in the effort to make ideal 
order actual in ourselves. 

What, then, since I said that it is a question 



A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 207 

how to live as well as how to express life, — 
what, then, is the ideal life? It is to make 
one's life a poem, as Milton dreamed of the 
true poet ; for as art works through matter and 
takes on concrete and sensible shape with its 
mortal conditions, so the soul dips in life, is in 
material action, and, suffering a similar fate, 
sinks into limitations and externals of this 
world and this flesh, through which it must 
live. In such a life, mortal in all ways, to 
bring down to earth the vision that floats in the 
soul's eyes, the ideal order as it is revealed to 
the poet's gaze, incorporating it in deed and 
being, and to make it prevail, so far as our lives 
have power, in the world of our life, is the task 
set for us. To disengage reason from the con- 
fusion of things, and behold the eternal forms 
of the mind; to unveil beauty in the transi- 
tory sights of our eyes, and behold the eternal 
forms of sense; so to act that the will within 
us shall take on this form of reason and our 
manifest life wear this form of beauty; and, 
more closely, to live in the primary affections, 
the noble passions, the sweet emotions, — 

" Founded in reason, loyal, just, and pure, 
Relations dear, and all the charities 
Of father, son, and brother, — " 



208 HEAKT OF MAN 

and also in the general sorrows of mankind, 
thereby, in joy and grief, entering sympatheti- 
cally into the hearts of common men; to keep 
in the highway of life, not turning aside to the 
eccentric, the sensational, the abnormal, the 
brutal, the base, but seeing them, if they must 
come within our vision, in their place only by 
the edges of true life ; and, if, being men, we 
are caught in the tragic coil, to seek the resto- 
ration of broken order, learning also in such 
bitterness better to understand the dark conflict 
forever waging in the general heart, the terror 
of the heavy clouds hanging on the slopes of 
our battle, the pathos that looks down even 
from blue skies that have kept watch o'er 
man's mortality, — so, even through failure, to 
draw nearer to our race ; this, as I conceive it, 
is to lead the ideal life. It is a message 
blended of many voices of the poets whom 
Shelley called, whatever might be their calam- 
ity on earth, the most fortunate of men; it 
rises from all lands, all ages, all religions; it 
is the battle-cry of that one great idea whose 
slow and hesitating growth is the unfolding of 
our long civilization, seeking to realize in de- 
mocracy the earthly, and in Christianity the 



A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 209 

heavenly, hope of man, — the idea of the com- 
munity of the soul, the sameness of it in all 
men. To lead this life is to be one with man 
through love, one with the universe through 
knowledge, one with God through the will; 
that is its goal, toward that we strive, in that 
we believe. 

And Thou, O Youth, for whom these lines are 
written, fear not ; idealize your friend, for it is 
better to love and be deceived than not to love 
at all; idealize your masters, and take Shelley 
and Sidney to your bosom, so shall they serve 
you more nobly and you love them more sweetly 
than if the touch and sight of their mortality 
had been yours indeed; idealize your country, 
remembering that Brutus in the dagger-stroke 
and Cato in his death-darkness knew not the 
greater Rome, the proclaimer of the unity of 
our race, the codifier of justice, the establisher 
of our church, and died not knowing, — but do 
you believe in the purpose of God, so shall you 
best serve the times to be; and in your own 
life, fear not to act as your ideal shall com- 
mand, in the constant presence of that other 
self who goes with you, as I have said, so shall 



210 HEAKT OF MAN 

you blend with him at the end. Fear not 
either to believe that the soul is as eternal as 
the order that obtains in it, wherefore you shall 
forever pursue that divine beauty which has 
here so touched and inflamed you, — for this is 
the faith of man, your race, and those who were 
fairest in its records. And have recourse 
always to the fountains of this life in litera- 
ture, which are the wells of truth. How to live 
is the one matter; the wisest man in his ripe 
age is yet to seek in it; but Thou, begin now 
and seek wisdom in the beauty of virtue and 
live in its light, rejoicing in it ; so in this world 
shall you live in the f oregleam of the world to 
come. 



DEMOCRACY 



DEMOCRACY 

Democracy is a prophecy, and looks to the 
future ; it is for this reason that it has its 
great career. Its faith is the substance of 
things hoped for and the evidence of things 
unseen, whose realization will be the labour of 
a long age. The life of historic nations has 
been a pursuit toward a goal under the im- 
pulse of ideas often obscurely comprehended, 
— world-ideas as we call them, — which they 
have embodied in accomplished facts and in 
the institutions and beliefs of mankind, lasting 
through ages; and as each nation has slowly 
grown aware of the idea which animated it, 
it has become self-conscious and conscious of 
greataess. That men are born equal is still a 
doctrine openly derided ; that they are born 
free is not accepted without much nullifying 
limitation; that they are born in brotherhood 
is less readily denied. These three, the revo- 
lutionary words, liberty, equality, fraternity, are 

213 



214 HEART OF MAN 

the substance of democracy, if the matter be well 
considered, and all else is but consequence. 

It might seem singular that man should 
ever have found out this creed, as that physical 
life could invent the brain, since the struggle 
for existence in primitive and early times was 
so adverse to it, and rested on a selfish and 
aggrandizing principle, in states as well as 
between races. In most parts of the world 
the first true governments were tyrannies, 
patriarchal or despotic ; and where liberty was 
indigenous, it was confined to the race-blood. 
Aristotle speaks of slavery without repugnance 
save in Greeks, and serfdom was incorporated 
in the northern tribes as soon as they began 
to be socially organized. Some have alleged 
that religious equality was an Oriental idea, 
and borrowed from the relation of subjects to 
an Asiatic despot, which paved the way for 
it ; some attribute civil equality to the Roman 
law ; some find the germ of both in Stoical 
morals. But so great an idea as the equality 
of man reaches down into the past by a thou- 
sand roots. The state of nature of the savage 
in the woods, which our fathers once thought 
a pattern, bore some outward resemblance to 



DEMOCEACY 215 

a freeman's life; but such a condition is 
rather one of private independence than of 
the grounded social right that democracy con- 
templates. How the ideas involved came into 
historical existence is a minor matter. Democ- 
racy has its great career, for the first time, 
in our national being, and exhibits here most 
purely its formative powers, and unfolds des- 
tiny on the grand scale. Nothing is more in- 
cumbent on us than to study it, to turn it 
this way and that, to handle it as often and 
in as many phases as possible with lively curi- 
osity, and not to betray ourselves by an easy 
assumption that so elementary a thing is com- 
prehended because it seems simple. Funda- 
mental ideas are precisely those with which 
we should be most familiar. 

Democracy is not merely a political experi- 
ment ; and its governmental theory, though so 
characteristic of it as not to be dissociated 
from it, is a result of underlying principles. 
There is always an ideality of the human spirit 
in all its works, if one will search them, which 
is the main thing. Tlie State, as a social 
aggregate with a joint life which constitutes 
it a nation, is dynamically an embodiment of 



216 HEAKT OF MAN 

human conviction, desire, and tendency, with a 
common basis of wisdom and energy of action, 
seeking to realize life in accordance with its 
ideal, whether traditional or novel, of what 
life should be ; and government is no more 
than the mode of administration under which 
it achieves its results both in national life and 
in the lives of its citizens. All society is a 
means of escape from personality, and its limi- 
tations of power and wisdom, into this larger 
communal life ; the individual, in so far, loses 
his particularity, and at the same time inten- 
sifies and strengthens that portion of his life 
which is thus made one with the general life 
of men, — that universal and typical life which 
they have in common and which moulds them 
with similar characteristics. It is by this fusion 
of the individual with the mass, this identifi- 
cation of himself with mankind in a joint activ- 
ity, this reenforcement of himself by what is 
himself in others, that a man becomes a social 
being. The process is the same, whether in 
clubs, societies of all kinds, sects, political par- 
ties, or the all-embracing body of the State. 
It is by making himself one with human nature 
in America, its faith, its methods, and the con- 



DEMOCRACY 217 

trolling purposes in our life among nations, and 
not by birth merely, that a man becomes an 
American. 

The life of society, however, includes various 
affairs, and man deals with them by different 
means ; thus property is a mode of dealing 
with things. Democracy is a mode of dealing 
with souls. Men commonly speak as if the 
soul were something they expect to possess 
in another world ; men are souls, and this is 
a fundamental conception of democracy. This 
spiritual element is the substance of democracy, 
in the large sense ; and the special governmental 
theory which it has developed and organized, 
and in which its ideas are partially included, 
is, like other such systems, a mode of admin- 
istration under which it seeks to realize its 
ideal of what life ought to be, with most speed 
and certainty, and on the largest scale. What 
characterizes that ideal is that it takes the soul 
into account in a way hitherto unknown ; not 
that other governments have not had regard 
to the soul, but, in democracy, it is spiritu- 
ality that gives the law and rules the issue. 
Hence, a great preparation was needed before 
democracy could come into effective control of 



218 HEART OF MAN 

society. Christianity mainly afforded this, in 
respect to the ideas of equality and fraternity, 
which were clarified and illustrated in the 
life of the Church for ages, before they en- 
tered practically into politics and the general 
secular arrangements of state organization ; the 
nations of progress, of which freedom is a con- 
dition, developed more definitely the idea of 
liberty, and made it familiar to the thoughts 
of men. Democracy belongs to a compara- 
tively late age of the world, and to advanced 
nations, because such ideas could come into 
action only after the crude material necessi- 
ties of human progress — illustrated in the 
warfare of nations, in military organizations for 
the extension of a common rule and culture 
among mankind, and in despotic impositions 
of order, justice, and the general ideas of civ- 
ilization — had relaxed, and a free course, by 
comparison at least, was opened for the higher 
nature of man in both private and public action. 
A conception of the soul and its destiny, not 
previously applicable in society, underlies de- 
mocracy ; this is why it is the most spiritual 
government known to man, and therefore the 
highest reach of man's evolution; it is, in 



DEMOCRACY 219 

fact, the spiritual element in society expressing 
itself now in politics with an unsuspected and 
incalculable force. 

Democracy is contained in the triple state- 
ment that men are born free, equal, and in 
brotherhood; and in this formula it is the 
middle term that is cardinal, and the root of all. 
Yet it is the doctrine of the equality of man, by 
virtue of the human nature with which he is 
clothed entire at birth, that is most attacked, as 
an obvious absurdity, and provocative more of 
laughter than of argument. What, then, is 
this equality which democracy affirms as the 
true state of all men among themselves? It is 
our common human nature, that identity of the 
soul in all men, which was first inculcated by 
the preaching of Christ's death for all equally, 
whence it followed that every human soul was 
of equal value in the eyes of God, its Creator, 
and had the same title to the rites of the 
Christian Church, and the same blessedness of 
an infinite immortality in the world to come ; 
thence we derived it from the very fountain of 
our faith, and the first true democracy was that 
which levelled king and peasant, barbarian and 
Roman, in the communion of our Lord. Yet 



220 HEAET OF MAN 

nature laughs at us, and ordains such inequal- 
ities at birth itself as make our peremptory 
charter of the value of men's souls seem a play 
of fancy. There are men of almost divine 
intelligence, men of almost devilish instincts, 
men of more or less clouded mind ; and they 
are such at birth, so deeply has nature stamped 
into them heredity, circumstance, and the physi- 
cal conditions of sanity, morality and whole- 
someness, in the body which is her work. Such 
differences do exist, and conditions vary the 
world over, whence nature, which accumulates 
inequalities in the struggle for life, "with ravin 
shrieks against our creed." But we have not 
now to learn for the first time that nature, 
though not the enemy of the human spirit, is 
indifferent to all the soul has erected in man's 
own realm, peculiar to humanity. What has 
nature contributed to the doctrine of freedom or 
of fraternity ? Man's life to her is all one, tyrant 
or slave, friend or foe, wise or foolish, virtuous 
or vicious, holy or profane, so long as her im- 
perative physical conditions of life, the mortal 
thing, are conformed to ; society itself is not 
her care, nor civilization, nor anything that 
belongs to man above the brute. Her word, 



DEMOCRACY 221 

consequently, need not disturb us ; she is not 
our oracle. It rather belongs to us to win 
further victory oyer her, if it may be, by our 
intelligence, and control her vital, as we are 
now coming to control her material, powers 
and their operation. 

This equality which democracy affirms — the 
identity of the soul, the sameness of its capaci- 
ties of energy, knowledge, and enjoyment — 
draws after it as a consequence the soul's right 
to opportunity for self -development by virtue 
of which it may possess itself of what shall be 
its own fulness of life. In the inscrutable 
mystery of this world, the soul at birth enters 
on an unequal struggle, made such both by 
inherent conditions and by external limitations, 
in individuals, classes, and races ; but the de- 
termination of democracy is that, so far as may 
be, it will secure equality of opportunity to 
every soul born within its dominion, in the 
expectation that much in human conditions 
which has hitherto fed and heightened in- 
equality, in both heredity and circumstance, 
may be lessened if not eradicated ; and life 
after birth is subject to great control. This is 
tlie meaning of the first axiom of democracy, 



222 HEART OF MAN 

that all have a right to the pursuit of happiness, 
and its early cries — "an open career," and "the 
tools to him who can use them." In this effort 
society seems almost as recalcitrant as nature ; 
for in human history the accumulation of the 
selfish advantage of inequality has told with as 
much effect as ever it did in the original struggle 
of reptile and beast; and in our present complex 
and extended civilization a slight gain over the 
mass entails a telling mortgage of the future 
to him who makes it and to his heirs, while effi- 
ciency is of such high value in such a society 
that it must needs be favoured to the utmost ; 
on the other hand a complex civilization en- 
courages a vast variety of talent, and finds a 
special place for that individuation of capacity 
which goes along with social evolution. The 
end, too, which democracy seeks is not a same- 
ness of specific results, but rather an equiva- 
lence ; and its duty is satisfied if the child of 
its rule finds such development as was possible 
to him, has a free course, and cannot charge 
his deficiency to social interference and the 
restriction of established law. 

The great hold that the doctrine of equality 
has upon the masses is not merely because it 



DEMOCRACY 223 

furnishes the justification of the whole scheme, 
which is a logic they may be dimly conscious 
of, but that it establishes their title to such 
good in human life as they can obtain, on 
the broadest scale and in the fullest measure. 
What other claim, so rational and noble in 
itself, can they put forth in the face of what 
they find established in the world they are born 
into ? The results of past civilization are still 
monopolized by small minorities of mankind, 
who receive by inheritance, under natural and 
civil law, the greater individual share of mate- 
rial comfort, of large intelligence, of fortunate 
careers. It does not matter that the things 
which belong to life as such, the greater bless- 
ings essential to human existence, cannot be 
monopolized ; all that man can take and appro- 
priate they find preoccupied so far as human 
discovery and energy have been able to reach, 
understand, and utilize it ; and what proposi- 
tion can they assert as against this sequestering 
of social results and material and intellectual 
opportunity, except to say, " we, too, are men," 
and with the word to claim a share in such parts 
of social good as are not irretrievably pledged 
to men better born, better educated, better 



224 HEART OF MAN 

supplied with the means of subsistence and 
the accumulated hoard of the past, which has 
come into their hands by an award of fortune ? 
It is not a fanciful idea. It is founded in 
the unity of human nature, which is as certain 
as any philosophic truth, and has been pro- 
claimed by every master-spirit of our race time 
out of mind. It is supported by the universal 
faith, in which we are bred, that we are chil- 
dren of a common Father, and saved by one 
Redeemer and destined to one immortality, and 
cannot be balked of the fulness of life which 
was our gift under divine providence. I em- 
phasize the religious basis, because I believe 
it is the rock of the foundation in respect to 
this principle, which cannot be successfully 
impeached by any one who accepts Christian 
truth ; while in the lower sphere, on worldly 
grounds alone, it is plain that the immense 
advantage of the doctrine of equality to the 
masses of men, justifies the advancement of it 
as an assumption which they call on the issue 
in time to approve. 

It is in this portion of the field that democ- 
racy relies most upon its prophetic power. 
Within the limits of nature and mortal life 



I 



DEMOCKACY 225 

the hope of any equal development of the soul 
seems folly; yet, so far as my judgment ex- 
tends, in men of the same race and community 
it appears to me that the sameness in essen- 
tials is so great as to leave the differences ines- 
sential, so far as power to take hold of life and 
possess it in thought, will, or feeling is in ques- 
tion. I do not see, if I may continue to speak 
personally, that in the great affairs of life, in 
duty, love, self-control, the willingness to serve, 
the sense of joy, the power to endure, there is 
any great difference among those of the same 
community ; and this is reasonable, for the per- 
manent relations of life, in families, in social 
ties, in public service, and in all that the belief 
in heaven and the attachments to home bring 
into men's lives, are the same ; and though, in 
the choicer parts of fortunate lives, aesthetic 
and intellectual goods may be more important 
than among the common people, these are less 
penetrating and go not to the core, which re- 
mains life as all know it — a thing of affection, 
of resolve, of service, of use to those to whom it 
may be of human use. Is it not reasonable, 
then, on the ground of what makes up the sub- 
stance of life within our observation, to accept 

Q 



226 HEART OF MAN 

this principle of equality, fortified as it is by 
any conception of heaven's justice to its crea- 
tures ? and to assume, if the word must be used, 
the principle primary in democracy, that all 
men are equally endowed with destiny? and 
thus to allow its prophetic claim, till disproved, 
that equal opportunity, linked with the service 
of the higher to the lower, will justify its 
hope ? At all events, in this lies the possibility 
of greater achievement than would otherwise 
be attained within our national limits ; and what 
is found to be true of us may be extended to 
less developed communities and races in their 
degree. 

The doctrine of the equality of mankind by 
virtue of their birth as men, with its consequent 
right to equality of opportunity for self -devel- 
opment as a part of social justice, establishes a 
common basis of conviction, in respect to man, 
and a definite end as one main object of the 
State ; and these elements are primary in the 
democratic scheme. Liberty is the next step, 
and is the means by which that end is secured. 
It is so cardinal in democracy as to seem hardly 
secondary to equality in importance. Every 
State, every social organization whatever, im- 



DEMOCRACY 227 

plies a principle of authority commanding obe- 
dience ; it may be of the absolute type of 
military and ecclesiastical use, or limited, as in 
constitutional monarchies ; but some obedience 
and some authority are necessary in order that 
the will of the State may be realized. The 
problem of democracy is to find that principle 
of authority which is most consistent with the 
liberty it would establish, and which acts with 
the greatest furtherance and the least interfer- 
ence in the accomplishment of the chief end in 
view. It composes authority, therefore, of per- 
sonal liberty itself, and derives it from the con- 
sent of the governed, and not merely from their 
consent but from their active decree. The social 
will is impersonal, generic, the will of man, not 
of men ; particular wills enter into it, and make 
it, so constituted, themselves in a larger and 
external form. The citizen has parted with no 
portion of his freedom of will ; the will of the 
State is still his own will, projected in unison 
with other wills, all jointly making up one sum, 
— the authority of the nation. This is social 
self-government, — not the anarchy of individ- 
uals each having his own way for himself, but 
government through a delegated self, if one 



228 HEART OF MAN 

may use the phrase, organically combined with 
others in the single power of control belonging 
to a State. This fusion is accomplished in the 
secondary stage, for the continuous action of 
the State, by representation, technically; but, 
in its primary stage and original validity, by 
universal suffrage ; for the characteristic trait 
of democracy is that in constituting this au- 
thority, which is social as opposed to personal 
freedom, — personal freedom existing in its 
social form, — it includes every unit of will, and 
gives to each equivalence. Democracy thus 
establishes the will of society in its most uni- 
versal form, lying between the opposite extremes 
of particularism in despotism and anarchy; it 
owns the most catholic organ of authority, and 
enters into it with the entire original force of 
the community. 

This universal will of democracy is distin- 
guished from the more limited forms of states 
partially embodying democratic principles by 
the fact that nothing enters into it except man 
as such. The rival powers which seek to en- 
croach upon this scheme, and are foreign ele- 
ments in a pure democracy, are education, 
property, and ancestry, which last has its claim 



DEMOCRACY 229 

as the custodian of education and property and 
the advantages flowing from their long posses- 
sion; the trained mind, the accumulated capital, 
and the fixed historic tradition of the nation in 
its most intense and efficient personal form are 
summed up in these, and would appropriate to 
themselves in the structure of government a 
representation not based on individual manhood 
but on other grounds. If it be still allowed 
that all men should have a share in a self- 
government, it is yet maintained that a share 
should be granted, in addition, to educated 
men and owners of property, and to descend- 
ants of such men who have founded per- 
manent families with an inherited capacity, 
a tradition, and a material stake. Yet these 
three things, education, property, and an- 
cestry, are in the front rank of those ine- 
qualities in human conditions which democracy 
would minimize. They embody past custom 
and present results which are a deposit of the 
past; they plead that they found men wards 
and were their guardians, and that under their 
own domination progress was made, and all that 
now is came into being ; but they must show 
farther some reason in present conditions under 



230 HEART OF MAN 

democracy now why such potent inequalities 
and breeders of inequality should be clothed 
with governing power. 

Universal suffrage is the centre of the dis- 
cussion, and the argument against it is twofold. 
It is said that, though much in the theory of 
democracy may be granted and its methods 
partially adopted, men at large lack the wis- 
dom to govern themselves for good in society, 
and also that they control by their votes much 
more than is rightfully their own. The opera- 
tion of the social will is in large concerns 
of men requiring knowledge and skill, and 
it has no limits. In state affairs education 
should have authority reserved to it, and cer- 
tain established interests, especially the rights 
of property, should be exempted from popular 
control ; and the effectual means of securing 
these ends is to magnify the representatives of 
education and property to such a degree that 
they will retain deciding power. But is this 
so ? or if there be some truth in the premises, 
may it not be contained in the democratic 
scheme and reconciled with it ? And, to begin 
with, is education, in the special sense, so 
important in the fundamental decisions which 



DEMOCRACY 231 

the suffrage makes? I speak, of course, of 
literary education. It may well be the case 
that the judgment of men at large is suffi- 
ciently informed and sound to be safe, and is 
the safest, for the reason that the good of 
society is for all in common, and being, from 
the political point of view, in the main, a mate- 
rial good, comes home to their business and 
bosoms in the most direct and universal way, 
in their comfort or deprivation, in prosperity 
and hard times, in war and famine, and those 
wide-extended results of national policies which 
are the evidence and the facts. Politics is very 
largely, and one might almost say normally, a 
conflict of material interests ; ideas dissociated 
from action are not its sphere ; the way in 
which policies are found immediately to affect 
human life is their political significance. On 
the broad scale, who is a better judge of their 
own material condition and the modifications 
of it from time to time, of what they receive 
and what they need from political agencies, 
than the individual men who gain or suffer by 
what is done, on so great a scale that, combined, 
these men make the masses ? Experience is 
their touchstone, and it is an experience univer- 



232 HEART OF MAN 

sally diffused. Education, too, is a word that 
will bear interpretation. It is not synonymous 
with intelligence, for intelligence is native in 
men, and, though increased by education, not 
conditioned upon it. Intelligence, in the limited 
sphere in which the unlearned man applies it, 
in the things he knows, may be more powerful, 
more penetrating, comprehensive, and quick, in 
him, than in the technically educated man; for 
he is educated by things, and especially in those 
matters which touch his own interests, widely 
shared. The school of life embodies a com- 
pulsory education that no man escapes. If 
politics, then, be in the main a conflict of 
material interests broadly affecting masses of 
men, the people, both individually and as a 
body, may well be more competent to deal with 
the matter in hand intelligently than those 
who, though highly educated, are usually some- 
what removed from the pressure of things, and 
feel results and also conditions, even widely 
prevalent, at a less early stage and with less 
hardship, and at best in very mild forms. Be- 
sides, to put it grossly, it is often not brains 
that are required to diagnose a political situa- 
tion so much as stomachs. The sphere of 



DEMOCRACY 233 

ideas, of reason and argument, in politics, is 
really limited ; in the main, politics is, as 
has been said, the selfish struggle of material 
interests in a vast and diversified State. 

Common experience furnishes a basis of polit- 
ical fact, well known to the people in their state 
of life, and also a test of any general policy once 
put into operation. The capacity of the people 
to judge the event in the long run must be 
allowed. But does broad human experience, 
however close and pressing, contain that fore- 
cast of the future, that right choice of the 
means of betterment, or even knowledge of 
the remedy itself, which belong in the proper 
sphere of enlightened intelligence ? I am not 
well assured that it is not so. The masses have 
been long in existence, and what affects them 
is seldom novel ; they are of the breed that 

through 

" old experience do attain 

To something like prophetic strain." 

The sense of the people, learning from their 
fathers and their mothers, sums up a vast 
amount of wisdom in common life, and more 
surely than in others the half-conscious tenden- 
cies of the times; for in them these are vital 



234 HEART OF MAN 

rather than reflective, and go on by the force of 
universal conditions, hopes, and energies. In 
them, too, intelligence works in precisely the 
same way as in other men, and in politics pre- 
cisely as in other parts of life. They listen to 
those they trust who, by neighbourhood, by sym- 
pathetic knowledge of their own state, or actual 
share in it, by superior powers of mind and a 
larger fund of information, are qualified to be 
their leaders in forming opinion and their 
instruments in the policy they adopt. These 
leaders may be called demagogues. They may 
be thought to employ only resources of trickery 
upon dupes for selfish ends ; but such a view, 
generally, is a shallow one, and not justified by 
facts. It is right in the masses to make men 
like themselves and nigh to them, especially 
those born and bred in their own condition of 
life, their leaders, in preference to men, how- 
ever educated, benevolent, and upright, who 
are not embodiments of the social conditions, 
needs, and aspirations of the people in their 
cruder life, if it in fact substantially be so, and 
to allow these men, so chosen, to find a leader 
among themselves. Such a man is a true chief 
of a party, who is not an individual holding 



DEMOCKACY 235 

great interests in trust and managing them 
with benevolent despotism by virtue of his own 
superior brain ; he is the incarnation, as a 
party chief, of other brains and wills, a rep- 
resentative exceeding by far in wisdom and 
power himself, a man in whom the units of 
society, millions of them, have their govern- 
mental life. No doubt he has great qualities 
of sympathy, comprehension, understanding, 
tact, efficient power, in order to become a 
chief; but he leads by following, he relies on 
his sense of public support, he rises by virtue 
of the common will, the common sense, which 
store themselves in him. Such the leaders of 
the people have always been. 

If this process — and it is to be observed 
that as the scale of power rises the more lim- 
ited elements of social influence enter into the 
result with more determining force — be appar- 
ently crude in its early stages, and imperfect at 
the best, is it different from the process of 
social expansion in other parts of life? Wher- 
ever masses of men are entering upon a rising 
and larger life, do not the same phenomena 
occur? in religion, for example, was there not 
a similar popular crudity, as it is termed b}^ 



236 HEART OF MAN 

some, a vulgarity as others name it, in the 
Methodist movement, in the Presbyterian move- 
ment, in the Protestant movement, world-wide? 
Was English Puritanism free from the same 
sort of characteristics, the things that are un- 
refined, as belong to democratic politics in 
another sphere ? The method, the phenomena, 
are those that belong to life universal, if life be 
free and efficient in moving masses of men 
upward into more noble ranges. Men of the 
people lead, because the people are the stake. 
On the other hand, educated leaders, however 
well-intentioned, may be handicapped if they 
are not rooted deeply in the popular soil. 
Literary education, it must never be forgotten, 
is not specially a preparation for political good 
judgment. It is predominantly concerned, in 
its high branches, with matters not of immediate 
political consequence — with books generally, 
science, history, language, technical processes 
and trades, professional outfits, and the mani- 
fold activity of life not primarily practical, or 
if practical not necessarily political. Men of 
education, scholars especially, even in the field 
of political system, are not by the mere fact 
of their scholarship highly or peculiarly fitted 



DEMOCRACY 237 

to take part in the active leadership of politics, 
unless they have other qualifications not neces- 
sarily springing from their pursuits in learning ; 
they are naturally more engaged with ideas in 
a free state, theoretical ideas, than with ideas 
which are in reality as much a part of life as of 
thought ; and the method of dealing with these 
vitalized and, as it were, adulterated ideas has 
a specialty of its own. 

It must be acknowledged, too, that in the 
past, the educated class as a whole has com- 
monly been found to entertain a narrow view; 
it has been on the side of the past, not of the 
future; previous to the revolutionary era the 
class was not — though it is now coming to 
be — a germinating element in reform, except 
in isolated cases of high genius which foresees 
the times to come and develops principles by 
which they come ; it has been, even during our 
era, normally in alliance with property and an- 
cestry, to which it is commonly an appurtenance, 
and like them is deeply engaged in the estab- 
lished order, under which it is comfortable, en- 
joying the places there made for its functions, 
and is conservative of the past, doubtful of the 
changing order, a liindriuice, a brake, often a 



238 HEART OF MAN 

note of despair. I do not forget the great excep- 
tions; but revolutions have come from below, 
from the masses and their native leaders, how- 
ever they may occasionally find some prep- 
aration in thinkers, and some welcome in 
aristocrats. The power of intellectual educa- 
tion as an element in life is always overvalued ; 
and, within its sphere, which is less than is 
represented, it is subject to error, prejudice, and 
arrogance of its own; and, being without any 
necessary connection with love or conscience, 
it has often been a reactionary, disturbing, 
or selfish force in politics and events, even 
when well acquainted with the field of poli- 
tics, as ever were any of the forms of dema- 
gogy in the popular life. Intelligence, in the 
form of high education, can make no authorita- 
tive claim, as such, either by its nature, its 
history, or, as a rule, its successful examples in 
character. The suffrage, except as by natural 
modes it embodies the people's practical and 
general intelligence, in direct decisions and in 
the representatives of themselves whom it 
elects to serve the State, need not look to 
high education as it has been in the privi- 
leged past, for light and leading in matters 



DEMOCRACY 239 

of fundamental concern ; education remains 
useful, as expert knowledge is always useful 
in matters presently to be acted on ; but in 
so far as it is separable from the business of 
the State, and stands by itself in a class not 
servants of the State and mainly critical and 
traditionary, it is deserving of no special polit- 
ical trust because of any superiority of judgment 
it may allege. In fact, education has entered 
with beneficent effect into political life with 
the more power, in proportion as it has become 
a common and not a special endowment, and the 
enfranchisement of education, if I may use the 
term, is rather a democratic than an aristocratic 
trait. Education, high education even, is more 
respected and counts for more in a democracy 
than under the older systems. But in a democ- 
racy it remains true, that so far as education 
deserves weight, it will secure it by its own 
resources, and enter into political results, as 
property does, with a power of its own. There, 
least of all, does it need privilege. Education is 
one inequality which democracy seems already 
dissolving. 

What suffrage records, in opposition it may 
be to educated opinion, as such, is tlie mental 



240 HEART OF MAN 

state of the people, and their choices of the men 
they trust with the accomplishment of what is 
to be done. If the suffrage is exposed to defect 
in wisdom by reason of its dulness and igno- 
rance, which I by no means admit, the remedy 
lies not in a guardianship of the people by the 
educated class, but in popular education itself, 
in lower forms, and the diffusion of that general 
information which, in conjunction with sound 
morals, is all that is required for the comprehen- 
sion of the great questions decided by suffrage, 
and the choice of fit leaders who shall carry the 
decisions into effect. The vast increase of this 
kind of intelligence, bred of such schools and 
such means for the spread of political informa- 
tion as have grown up here, has been a meas- 
ureless gain to man in many other than political 
ways. No force has been so great, except the 
discussion of religious dogma and practice 
under the Reformation in northern nations, 
in establishing a mental habit throughout the 
community. The suffrage also has this invalu- 
able advantage, that it brings about a substitu- 
tion of the principle of persuasion for that of 
force, as the normal mode of dealing with 
important differences of view in State affairs; 



DEMOCRACY 241 

it is, in this respect, the corollary of free speech, 
and the preservative of that great element of 
liberty, and progress under liberty, which is not 
otherwise well safe-guarded. It is also a con- 
tinuous thing, and deals with necessities and 
disagreements as they arise and by gradual 
means, and thus, by preventing too great an 
accumulation of discontent, it avoids revolution, 
containing in itself the right of revolution in a 
peaceable form under law. It is, moreover, a 
school into which the citizen is slowly re- 
ceived; and it is capable of receiving great 
masses of men and accustoming them to polit- 
ical thought, free and efficient action in political 
affairs, and a civic life in the State, breeding in 
them responsibility for their own condition and 
that of the State. It is the voice of the people 
always speaking; nor is it to be forgotten, 
especially by those who fear it, that the ques- 
tions which come before the suffrage for settle- 
ment are, in view of the whole complex and 
historic body of the State, comparatively few ; 
for society and its institutions, as the fathers 
handed them down, are accepted at birth and 
by custom and with real veneration, as our 
birthright, — the birthright of a race, a nation, 



242 HEART OF MAN 

and a hearth. The suffrage does not under- 
take to rebuild from the foundations ; the 
people are slow to remove old landmarks ; but 
it does mean to modify and strengthen this 
inheritance of past ages for the better accom- 
plishment of the ends for which society exists, 
and the better distribution among men of the 
goods which it secures. 

Fraternity, the third constituent of democ- 
racy, enforces the idea of equality through its 
doctrine of brotherhood, and enlarges the idea 
of liberty, which thus becomes more than an 
instrument for obtaining private ends, is in- 
spired with a social spirit and has bounds 
set to its exercise. Fraternity leads us, in 
general, to share our good, and to provide 
others with the means of sharing in it. This 
good is inexhaustible, and makes up welfare 
in the State, the common weal. It is in the 
sphere of fraternity, in particular, that humani- 
tarian ideas, and those expressions of the social 
conscience which we call moral issues, gener- 
ally arise, and enter more or less completely 
into political life. In defining politics as, in 
the main, a selfish struggle of material inter- 
ests, this was reserved, that, from time to time, 



DEMOCRACY 243 

questions of a higher order do arise, such as that 
of slavery in our history, which have in them 
a finer element; and, though it be true that 
government has in charge a race which is yet 
so near to the soil that it is never far from want, 
and therefore government must concern itself 
directly and continuously with arrangements 
for our material welfare, yet the higher life 
has so far developed that matters which con- 
cern it more intimately are within the sphere 
of political action, and among these we reckon 
all those causes which appeal immediately to 
great principles, to liberty, justice, and man- 
hood, as things apart from material gain or 
loss, and in our consciousness truly spiritual ; 
and such a cause, preeminently, was the war 
for the Union, heavy as it was with the fate 
of mankind under democracy. In such crises, 
which seldom arise, material good is subor- 
dinated for the time being, and life and prop- 
erty, our great permanent interests, are held 
cheap in the balance with that which is their 
great charter of value, as we conceive our 
country. 

Yet even here material interests are not far 
distant. Such issues are commonly found to 



244 HEART OF MAN 

be involved with material interests in conflict, 
or are alloyed with them in the working out; 
and these interests are a constituent, though, it 
may be, not the controlling matter. It is com- 
monly felt, indeed, that some warrant of mate- 
rial necessity is required in any great political 
act, for politics, as has been said, is an affair 
of life, not of free ideas ; and without such a 
plain authorization reform is regarded as an 
invasion of personal liberty of thought, expres- 
sion, or action, which is the breeding-place of 
progressive life and therefore carefully guarded 
from intrusion. In proportion as the material 
interests are less clearly affected injuriously, a 
cause is removed into the region of moral 
suasion, and loses political vigour. Religious 
issues constitute the extreme of political action 
without regard to material interests, wars of 
conversion being their ultimate, and they are 
more potent with less developed races. For 
this reason the humanitarian and moral sphere 
of fraternity lies generally outside of politics, 
in social institutions and habits, which political 
action may sometimes favour as in public chari- 
ties, but which usually rely on other resources 
for their support. On occasions of crisis, how- 



DEMOCRACY U5 

ever, a great idea may marshal the whole 
community in its cause ; and, more and more, 
the cause so championed under democracy is 
the spiritual right of man. 

But fraternity finds, perhaps, its great seal 
of sovereignty in that principle of persuasion 
which has been spoken of already, and in that 
substitution of it for force, in the conduct of 
human affairs, which democracy has made, as 
truly as it has replaced tyranny with the au- 
thority of a delegated and representative lib- 
erty. Persuasion, in its moral form, outside of 
politics, — which is so largely resorted to in a 
community that does not naturally regard the 
imposition of virtue, even, with favour, but 
believes virtue should be voluntary in the 
man and decreed by him out of his own soul, 
— need not be enlarged upon here ; but in its 
intellectual form, as a persuasion of the mind 
and will necessarily precedent to political action, 
it may be glanced at, since law thus becomes 
the embodied persuasion of the community, and 
is itself no longer force in the objectionable 
sense ; even minorities, to which it is adversely 
applied, and on which it thus operates like tyr- 
anny, recognize the different character it bears 



246 HEART OF MAN 

to arbitrary power as that has historically been. 
But outside of this refinement of thought in 
the analysis, the fact that the normal attitude 
of any cause in a democracy is that men must 
be persuaded of its justice and expediency, 
before it can impose itself as the will of the 
State on its citizens, marks a regard for men as 
a brotherhood of equals and freemen, of the 
highest consequence in State affairs, and with 
a broad overflow of moral habit upon the rest 
of life. 

That portion of the community which is not 
reached by persuasion, and remains in opposi- 
tion, must obey the law, and submit, such is the 
nature of society ; but minorities have acknowl- 
edged rights, which are best preserved, per- 
haps, by the knowledge that they may be useful 
to all in turn. These rights are more respected 
under democracy than in any other form of 
government. The important question here, 
however, is not the conduct of the State toward 
an opposition in general, which is at one time 
composed of one element and at another time 
of a different element, and is a shifting, change- 
able, and temporary thing ; but of its attitude 
toward the more permanent and inveterate 



DEMOCRACY 247 

minority existing in class interests, which are 
exposed to popular attack. The capital in- 
stance is property, especially in the form of 
wealth ; and here belongs that objection to the 
suffrage, which was lightly passed over, to the 
effect that, since the social will has no limits, 
to constitute it by suffrage is to give the people 
control of what is not their own. Property, 
reenforced by the right of inheritance, is the 
great source of inequality in the State and the 
continuer of it, and gives rise perpetually to 
political and social questions, attended with 
violent passions ; but it is an institution com- 
mon to civilization, it is very old, and it is 
bound up intimately with the motive energies 
of individual life, the means of supplying soci- 
ety on a vast scale with production, distribu- 
tion, and communication, and the process of 
taking possession of the earth for man's use. 
Its social service is incalculable. At times, 
however, when accumulated so as to congest 
society, property has been confiscated in enor- 
mous amounts, as in England under Henry 
VIII., in France at the Revolution, and in 
Italy in recent times. The principle of para- 
mount right over it in society has been estab- 



248 HEART OF MAN 

lished in men's minds, and is modified only by 
the social conviction that this right is one to be 
exercised with the highest degree of care and 
on the plainest dictates of a just necessity. 
Taxation, nevertheless, though a power to de- 
stroy and confiscate in its extreme exercise, 
normally takes nothing from, property that is 
not due. It is not a levy of contributions, but 
the collection of a just debt ; for property and 
its owners are the great gainers by society, 
under whose bond alone wealth finds security, 
enjoyment, and increase, carrying with them 
untold private advantages. Property is deeply 
indebted to society in a thousand ways; and, 
besides, much of its material cannot be said to 
be earned, but was given either from the great 
stores of nature, or by the hand of the law, 
conferring privilege, or from the overflowing 
increments of social progress. If it is natu- 
rally selfish, acquisitive, and conservative, if 
it has to be subjected to control, if its duties 
have to be thrust upon it oftentimes, it has 
such powers of resistance that there need be 
little fear lest it should suffer injustice. Like 
education, it has great reserves of influence, 
and is assured of enormous weight in the life 



DEMOCRACY 249 

of the community. Other vested interests 
stand in a similar relation to the State. These 
minorities, which are important and lasting ele- 
ments in society, receive consideration, and 
bounds are set to liberty of dealing adversely 
with them in practice, under that principle of 
fraternity which seeks the good of one in all 
and the good of all in one. 

Fraternity, following lines whose general 
sense has been sufficiently indicated, has, in 
particular, established out of the common fund 
public education as a means of diffusing intel- 
lectual gain, which is the great element of 
growth even in efficient toil, and also of ex- 
tending into all parts of the body politic a 
comprehension of the governmental scheme and 
the organized life of the community, fusing its 
separate interests in a mutual understanding 
and regard. It has established, too, protection 
in the law, for the weak as against the strong, 
the poor as against the rich, the citizen as 
against those who would trustee the State for 
their own benefit ; and, on the broad scale, it 
provides for the preservation of the public 
health, relief of the unfortunate, the care of all 
children, and in a thousand humane ways per- 



260 HEART OF MAN 

meates the law with its salutary justice. It 
has, again, in another great field, established 
toleration, not in religion merely, but of opin- 
ion and practice in general ; and thereby largely 
has built up a mutual and pervading faith in 
the community as a body in all its parts and 
interests intending democratic results under 
human conditions ; it has thus bred a habit of 
reserve at moments of hardship or grave diffi- 
culty, — a respect that awaits social justice giv- 
ing time for it to be brought about, — which as 
a constituent of national character cannot be 
too highly prized. 

The object of all government, and of every 
social system is, in its end and summary, to 
secure justice among mankind. Justice is the 
most sacred word of men ; but it is a thing 
hard to find. Law, which is its social instru- 
ment, deals with external act, general condi- 
tions, and mankind in the mass. It is not, 
like conscience, a searcher of men's bosoms ; its 
knowledge extends no farther than to what 
shall illuminate the nature of the event it 
examines ; it makes no true ethical award. It 
is in the main a method of procedure, largely 
inherited and wholly practical in intent, applied 



DEMOCRACY 261 

to recurring states of fact ; it is a reasonable 
arrangement for the peaceful facilitation of hu- 
man business of all social kinds ^ and to a con- 
siderable degree it is a convention, an agreement 
upon what shall be done in certain sets of cir- 
cumstances, as an approximation, it may be, to 
justice, but, at all events, as an advantageous 
solution of difficulties. This is as true of its 
criminal as of its civil branches. Its concern 
is with society rather than the individual, and 
it sacrifices the individual to society without 
compunction, applying one rule to all alike, 
with a view to social, not individual, results, on 
the broad scale. Those matters which make 
individual justice impossible, — especially the 
element of personal responsibility in wrong- 
doing, how the man came to be what he is and 
his susceptibility to motives, to reason and to 
passion, in their varieties, and all such con- 
siderations, — law ignores in the main question, 
however it may admit them in the imperfect 
form in which only they can be known, as 
circumstances in extenuation or aggravation. 
This large part of responsibility, it will seem 
to every reflective moralist, enters little into 
the law's survey; and its penalties, at best. 



252 HEAET OF MAN 

are "the rack of this rude world." Death 
and imprisonment, as it inflicts them, are for 
the protection of society, not for reformation, 
though the philanthropic element in the State 
may use the period of imprisonment with a 
view to reformation ; nor in the history of the 
punishment of crime, of the vengeance as such 
taken on men in addition to the social protec- 
tion sought, has society on the whole been less 
brutal in its repulse of its enemies than they 
were in their attack, or shown any eminent 
justice toward its victims in the sphere of their 
own lives. It is a terrible and debasing record, 
up to this century at least, and uniformly cor- 
rupted those who were its own instruments. 
It was the application of force in its most 
material forms, and dehumanized those upon 
whom it was exercised, placing them outside 
the pale of manhood as a preliminary to its 
work. The lesson that the criminal remains 
a man, was one taught to the law, not learned 
from it. On the civil side, likewise, similar 
reservations must be made, both as regards its 
formulation and operation. The law as an 
instrument of justice is a rough way of dealing 
with the problems of the individual in society, 



DEMOCRACY 263 

but it is effective for social ends ; and, in its 
total body and practical results, it is a priceless 
monument of human righteousness, sagacity, 
and mercy, and though it lags behind opinion, 
as it must, and postpones to a new age 
the moral and prudential convictions of the 
present, it is in its treasury that these at 
last are stored. 

If such be the case within the law, what in- 
difference to justice does the course of events 
exhibit in the world at large which comes under 
the law's inquisition so imperfectly! How con- 
tinuous and inevitable, how terrible and pitiful 
is this aspect of life, is shown in successive 
ages by the unending story of ideal tragedy, in 
poem, drama, and tale, in which the noble na- 
ture through some frailty, that was but a part, 
and by the impulse of some moment of brief 
time, comes to its wreck ; and, in connection 
with this disaster to the best, lies the action of 
the villain everywhere overflowing in suffering 
and injury upon his victims and all that is theirs. 
What is here represented as the general lot 
of mankind, in ideal works, exists, multiplied 
world-wide in the lives and fortunes of man- 
kind, an inestimable amount of injustice al- 



264 HEAET OF MAN 

ways present. The sacrifice of innocence is in 
no way lessened by aught of vengeance that 
may overtake the wrong-doer ; and it is con- 
stant. The murdered man, the wronged woman, 
can find no reparation. What shall one say 
of the sufferings of children and of the old, 
and of the great curse that lies in heredity and 
the circumstances of early life under depraved, 
ignorant, or malicious conditions ? These bru- 
talities, like the primeval struggle in the rise 
of life, seem in a world that never heard the 
name of justice. The main seat of individual 
justice and its operation is, after all, in the 
moral sense of men, governing their own con- 
duct, and modifying so far as possible the mass 
of injustice continually arising in the process 
of life, by such relief as they can give by per- 
sonal influence and action both on persons and 
in the realm of moral opinion. 

But, such questions apart, and within the 
reach of the rude power of the law over men 
in the mass, where individuality may be neg- 
lected, there remains that portion of the field 
in which the cause of justice may be advanced, 
as it was in the extinction of slavery, the con- 
fiscation of the French lands, the abolition of 



DEMOCRACY 255 

the poor debtor laws, and in similar great meas- 
ures of class legislation, if you will. I confess 
I am one of those who hold that society is 
largely responsible even for crime and pauper- 
ism, and especially other less clearly defined 
conditions in the community by which there 
exists an inveterate injustice ingrained in the 
structure of society itself. The process of free- 
ing man from the fetters of the past is still in- 
complete, and democracy is a faith still early in 
its manifestation ; social justice is the cry under 
which this progress is made, and, being grounded 
in material conditions and hot with men's pas- 
sions under wrong, it is a dangerous cry, and un- 
heeded it becomes revolutionary; but in what 
has democracy been so beneficent to society as 
in the ways without number that it has opened 
for the doing of justice to men in masses, for 
the moulding of safe and orderly methods of 
change, and for the formation as a part of hu- 
man character of a habit of philanthropy to 
those especially whose misfortunes may be 
partly laid to the door of society itself ? Char- 
ity, great as it is, can but alleviate, it cannot 
upon any scale cure poverty and its attendant 
ills ; nor can mercy, however humanely and 



256 HEART OF MAN 

wisely exerted, do more than mollify the mis- 
fortune that abides in the criminal. Social 
justice asks neither charity nor mercy, but such 
conditions, embodied in institutions and laws, 
as shall diminish, so far as under nature and 
human nature is possible, the differences of 
men at birth, and in their education, and in 
their opportunity through life, to the end that 
all citizens shall be equal in the power to begin 
and conduct their lives in morals, industry, and 
the hope of happiness. Social justice, so de- 
fined, under temporal conditions, democracy 
seeks as the sum and substance of its effort in 
governmental ways ; some advance has been 
made ; but it requires no wide survey, nor long 
examination, to see that what has been accom- 
plished is a beginning, with the end so far in 
the future as to seem a dream, such as the poets 
have sung almost from the dawn of hope. 
What matters it? It is not only poets who 
dream ; justice is the statesman's dream. 

Such in bold outline are the principles of 
democracy. They have been working now for 
a century in a great nation, not wholly unfet- 
tered and on a complete scale even with us, but 
with wider acceptance and broader application 



DEMOCRACY 257 

than elsewhere in the world, and with most 
prosperity in those parts of the country where 
they are most mastering; and the nation 
has grown great in their charge. What, 
in brief, are the results, so clear, so grand, 
so vast, that they stand out like moun- 
tain ranges, the configuration of a national 
life ? The diffusion of material comfort among 
masses of men, on a scale and to an amount 
abolishing peasantry forever ; the dissemina- 
tion of education, which is the means of life 
to the mind as comfort is to the body, in no 
more narrow bounds, but through the State 
universal, abolishing ignorance ; the develop- 
ment of human capacity in intelligence, energy, 
and character, under the stimulus of the open 
career, with a result in enlarging and concen- 
trating the available talent of the State to a 
compass and with an efficiency and diversity 
by which alone was possible the material sub- 
jugation of the continent which it has made 
tributary to man's life ; the planting of self- 
respect in millions of men, and of respect for 
others grounded in self-respect, constituting 
a national characteristic now first to be found, 
and to be found in the bosom of every child 
9 



268 HEART OE MAN 

of our soil, and, with this, of a respect for 
womanhood, making the common ways safe 
and honourable for her, unknown before ; the 
moulding of a conservative force, so sure, so 
deep, so instinctive, that it has its seat in the 
very vitals of the State and there maintains as 
its blood and bone the principles which the 
fathers handed down in institutions containing 
our happiness, security, and destiny, yet main- 
tains them as a living present, not as a dead 
past ; the incorporation into our body politic of 
millions of half-alien people, without disturb- 
ance, and with an assimilating power that 
proves the universal value of democracy as a 
mode of dealing with the race, as it now is ; an 
enthronement of reason as the sole arbiter in a 
free forum where every man may plead, and 
have the judgment of all men upon the cause ; 
a rooted repugnance to use force ; an aversion 
to war ; a public and private generosity that 
knows no bounds of sect, race, or climate ; a 
devotion to public duty that excuses no man 
and least of all the best, and has constantly 
raised the standard of character ; a commisera- 
tion for all unfortunate peoples and warm sym- 
pathy with them in their struggles ; a love of 



DEMOCEACY 259 

country as inexhaustible in sacrifice as it is 
unparalleled in ardour ; and a will to serve the 
world for the rise of man into such manhood as 
we have achieved, such prosperity as earth has 
yielded us, and such justice as, by the grace of 
heaven, is established within our borders. Is 
it not a great work? and all these blessings, 
unconjfined as the element, belong to all our 
people. In the course of these results, the 
imperfection of human nature and its institu- 
tions has been present; but a just comparison 
of our history with that of other nations, ages, 
and systems, and of our present with our past, 
shows that such imperfection in society has 
been a diminishing element with us, and that 
a steady progress has been made in methods, 
measures, and men. No great issue, in a whole 
century, has been brought to a wrong conclu- 
sion. Our public life has been starred with 
illustrious names, famous for honesty, sagacity, 
and humanity, and, above all, for justice. Our 
Presidents in particular have been such men as 
democracy should breed, and some of them such 
men as humanity has seldom bred. We are a 
proud nation, and justly ; and, looking to the 
future, beholding these things multiplied mill- 



260 HEART OF MAN 

ion-fold in the lives of the children of the land 
to be, we may well humbly own God's bounty 
which has earliest fallen upon us, the first fruitis 
of democracy in the new ages of a humaner 
world. 

It will be plain to those who have read what 
has elsewhere been said of the ideal life, that 
democracy is for the nation a true embodiment 
of that life, and wears its characteristics upon 
its sleeve. In it the individual mingles with 
the mass, and becomes one with mankind, and 
mankind itself sums the totality of individual 
good in a well-nigh perfect way. In it there is 
the slow embodiment of a future nobly con- 
ceived and brought into existence on an ideal 
basis of the best that is, from age to age, in 
man's power. It includes the universal wisdom, 
the reach of thought and aspiration, by virtue of 
which men climb, and here manhood climbs. 
It knows no limit ; it rejects no man who wears 
the form Christ wore ; it receives all into its 
benediction. Through democracy, more read- 
ily and more plainly than through any other 
system of government or conception of man's 
nature and destiny, the best of men may blend 
with his race, and store in their common life the 



DEMOCRACY 261 

energies of his own soul, looking for as much 
aid as he may give. Democracy, as elsewhere 
has been said, is the earthly hope of men ; and 
they who stand apart, in fancied superiority to 
mankind, which is by creation equal in destiny, 
and in fact equal in the larger part of human 
nature, however obstructed by time and cir- 
cumstance, are foolish withdrawers from the 
ways of life. On the battle-field or in the sen- 
ate, or in the humblest cabin of the West, to 
lead an American life is to join heart and soul 
in this cause. 



THE RIDE 



THE EIDE 

Mystery is the natural habitat of the soul. 
It is the child's element, though he sees it not ; 
for, year by year, acquiring the solid and pal- 
pable, the visible and audible, the things of 
mortal life, he lives in horizons of the senses, 
and though grown a youth he still looks in- 
tellectually for things definite and clear. Edu- 
cation in general through its whole period 
induces the contempt of all else, impressing 
almost universally the positive element in life, 
whose realm in early years at least is sensual. 
So it was with me : the mind's eye saw all 
that was or might be in an atmosphere of 
scepticism, as my bodily eye beheld the world 
washed in colour. Yet the habitual sense of 
mystery in man's life is a measure of wisdom 
in the man ; and, at last, if the mind be open 
and turn upon the poles of truth, whether in 
the sage's knowledge or the poet's emotion or 
such common experience of the world as all 

265 



266 HEART OF MAN 

have, mystery visibly envelops us, equally in 
the globed sky or the unlighted spirit. 

I well remember the very moment when a 
poetical experience precipitated this conviction 
out of moods long familiar, but obscurely felt 
and deeply distrusted. I was born and bred 
by the sea ; its mystery had passed into my 
being unawares, and was there unconscious, or, 
at least, not to be separated from the moods 
of my own spirit. But on my first Italian 
voyage, day by day we rolled upon the tre- 
mendous billows of a stormy sea, and all was 
strange and solemn — the illimitable tossing 
of a wave-world, darkening night after night 
through weird sunsets of a spectral and un- 
known beauty, enchantments that were door- 
ways of a new earth and new heavens; and, 
on the tenth day, when I came on deck in this 
water-world, we had sighted Santa Maria, the 
southernmost of the Azores, and gradually we 
drew near to it. I shall never forget the 
strangeness of that sight — that solitary island 
under the sunlit showers of early morning ; it 
lay in a beautiful atmosphere of belted mists 
and wreaths of rain, and tracts of soft sky, 
frequent with many near and distant rain- 



THE RIDE 267 

bows that shone and faded and came again as 
we steamed through them, and the white wings 
of the birds, struck by the sun, were the whitest 
objects I have ever seen; slowly we passed 
by, and I could not have told what it was in 
that island scene which had so arrested me. 
But when, some days afterward, at the harbor 
of Gibraltar I looked upon the magnificent 
rock, and saw opposite the purple hills of 
Africa, again I felt through me that unknown 
thrill. It was the mystery of the land. It was 
altogether a discovery, a direct perception, a new 
sense of the natural world. Under the wild 
heights of Sangue di Christo I had dreamed 
that on the further side I should find the " far 
west" that had fled before me beyond the river, 
the prairies, and the plains ; but there was no 
such mystery in the thought, or in the prospect, 
as this that saluted me coming landward for the 
first time from the ocean-world. Since that 
morning in the Straits, every horizon has been 
a mystery to me, to the spirit no less than to 
the eye ; and truths have come to me like that 
lone island embosomed in eternal waters, like 
the capes and mountain barriers of Africa 
thrusting up new continents unknown, un- 



268 HEART OF MAN 

travelled, of a land men yet might tread as 
common ground. 

"A poet's mood" — I know what once I 
should have said. But mystery I then accepted 
as the only complement, the encompassment, 
of what we know of our life. In many ways 
I had drawn near to this belief before, and I 
have since many times confirmed it. One 
occasion, however, stands out in my memory 
even more intensely than those I have made 
bold to mention, — one experience that brought 
me near to my mother earth, as that out of 
which I was formed and to which I shall return, 
and made these things seem as natural as to 
draw my breath from the sister element of air. 
I had returned to the West ; and while there, 
wandering in various places, I went to a small 
town, hardly more than a hamlet, some few 
hundred miles beyond the Missouri, where the 
mighty railroad, putting out a long feeler for 
the future, had halted its great steel branch — 
sinking like a thunderbolt into the ground for 
no imaginable reason, and affecting me vaguely 
with a sense of utmost limits. There a younger 
friend, five years my junior, in his lonely 
struggle with life bore to live, in such a camp 



THE RIDE 269 

of pioneer civilization as made my heart fail at 
first sight, though not unused to the meagre- 
ness, crudity, and hardness of such a place ; 
but there I had come to take the warm wel- 
come of his hands and look once more into 
his face before time should part us. He flung 
his arms about me, with a look of the South 
in his eyes, full of happy dancing lights, and 
the barren scene was like Italy made real for 
one instant of golden time. 

But if we had wandered momentarily, as if 
out of some quiet sunlit gallery of Monte Beni, 
I soon found it was into the frontier of our 
western border. A herd of Texas ponies were 
to be immediately on sale, and I went to see them 

— wild animals, beautiful in their wildness, 
who had never known bit or spur ; they were 
lariated and thrown down, as the buyers picked 
them out, and then led and pulled away to 
man's life. It was a typical scene : the pen, the 
hundred ponies bunched together and startled 
with the new surroundings, the cowboys whose 
resolute habit sat on them like cotillion grace 

— athletes in the grain — with the gray, close 
garb for use, the cigarette like a slow spark 
under the broad sombrero, the belted revolver, 



270 HEART OF MAN 

the lasso hung loose-coiled in the hand, quiet, 
careless, confident, with the ease of the master 
in his craft, now pulling down a pony without 
a struggle, and now showing strength and dex- 
terity against frightened resistance ; but the 
hour sped on, and our spoil was two of these 
creatures, so attractive to me at least that every 
moment my friend's eye was on me, and he 
kept saying, " They're wild, mind ! " The next 
morning in the dark dawn we had them in 
harness, and drove out, when the stars were 
scarce gone from the sky, due north to the Bad 
Lands, to give me a new experience of the vast 
American land that bore us both, and made us, 
despite the thousands of miles that stretched 
between ocean and prairie, brothers in blood 
and brain, — brothers and friends. 

Yet how to tell that ride, now grown a shin- 
ing leaf of my book of memory ! for my eyes 
were fascinated with the land, in the high blow- 
ing August wind, full of coolness and upland 
strength, like new breath in my nostrils ; and 
forward over the broken country, fenceless, 
illimitable, ran the brown road, like a ploughed 
ribbon of soil, into the distance, where pioneer 
and explorer and prospector had gone before, 



THE RIDE 271 

and now the farmer was thinly settling, — the 
new America growing up before my eyes ! and 
him only by me to make me not a stranger 
there, with talk of absent friends and old times, 
though scarce the long age of a college course 
had gone by, — talk lapsing as of old on such 
rides into serious strains, problems such as the 
young talk of together and keep their secret, 
learning life, — the troubles of the heart of youth. 
And if now I recur to some of the themes we 
touched on, and set down these memoranda, 
fragments of life, thinking they may be of use 
to other youths as they were then to us, I 
trust they will lose no privacy ; for, as I write, 
I see them in that place, with that noble pros- 
pect, that high sky, and him beside me whose 
young listening yet seems to woo them from 
my breast. 

We mounted the five-mile ridge, — and, 
"Poor Robin," he said, "what of him?" 
"Poor Robin sleeps in the Muses' graveyard," 
I laughed, "in the soft gray ashes of my 
blazing hearth. One must live the life before 
he tells the tale." "I loved his 'awaken- 
ing,' " he replied, " and I have often thought 
of it by myself. And will nothing come of 



272 HEART OF MAN 

him now?" "Who can tell?" I said, looking 
hard off over the prairie. " The Muses must 
care for their own. That ' awakening,' " I went 
on, after a moment of wondering why the dis- 
tant stream of the valley was called " the Look- 
ing-glass," and learning only that such was its 
name, "was when after the bookish torpor of 
his mind — you remember he called books his 
opiates — he felt the beauty of the spring and 
the marvel of human service come back on him 
like a flood. It was the growing consciousness 
of how little of life is our own. Youth takes 
life for granted; the hand that smoothed his 
pillow the long happy years, the springs that 
brought new blossoms to his cheeks, the com- 
mon words that martyr and patriot have died 
to form on childish lips, and make them native 
there with life's first breath, are natural to him as 
Christmas gifts, and bring no obligation. Our 
life from babyhood is only one long lesson in 
indebtedness ; and we best learn what we have 
received by what we give. This was dawning 
on my hero then. I recall how he ran the 
new passion. That outburst you used to like, 
amid the green bloom of the prairies, like the 
misted birches at home, under the heaven-wide 



THE EIDE 273 

warmtli of April breathing with universal mild- 
ness through the softened air — why, you can 
remember the very day," I said. " It v/as 
one — " "Yes, I can remember more than 
that," he interrupted ; " I know the words, or 
some of them ; what you just said was the old 
voice — tang and colour — Poor Robin's voice ; " 
and he began, and I listened to the words, 
which had once been mine, and now were his. 

" By heaven, I never believed it. ' Clotho 
spins, Lachesis weaves, and Atropos cuts,' I 
said, ' and the poor illusion vanishes ; the loud 
laughter, the fierce wailing, die on pale lips ; 
the foolish and the wise, the merciful and the 
pitiless, the workers in the vineyard and the 
idlers in the market-place, are huddled into 
one grave, and the heart of Mary Mother and 
of Mary Magdalen are one dust.' Duly in 
those years the sun rose to cheer me; the 
breath of the free winds was in my nostrils ; 
the grass made my pathways soft to my feet. 
Spring with its blossomed fruit trees, and the 
ungarnered summer, gladdened me ; the flame 
of autumn was my torch of memory, and win- 
ter lighted my lamp of solitude. Men tilled 



274 HEAET OF MAN 

the fields to feed me, and worked the loom to 
clothe me, and so far as in them was power 
and in me was need, brought to my doors sus- 
tenance for the body and whatsoever of divine 
truth was theirs for my soul. Women minis- 
tered to me in blessed charities; and some 
among my fellows gave me their souls in keep- 
ing. How true is that which my friend said 
to the poor boy-murderer condemned to die, — 
' I tell you, you cannot escape the mercy of 
God;' and tears coursed down the imbruted 
face, and once more the human soul, that the 
ministers of God could not reach, shone in its 
tabernacle. Now the butterfly has flown in at 
the tavern- window, and rebuked me. I go out, 
and on the broad earth the warm sun shines ; 
the spring moves throughout our northern 
globe as when first man looked upon it; the 
seasons keep their word ; the birds know their 
pathways through the air; the animals feed 
and multiply ; the succession of day and night 
has no shadow of turning ; the stars keep their 
order in the blue depths of infinite space ; 
Sirius has not swerved from his course, nor 
Aldebaran flamed beyond his sphere ; nature 
puts forth her strength in all the vast compass 



THE KIDE 275 

of Jier domain, and is manifest in life that con- 
tinues and is increased in fuller measures of 
joy, heightened to fairer beauty, instinct with 
love in the heart of man. Wiser were the 
ascetics whom I used to scorn; they made 
themselves ascetics of the body, but I have 
been an ascetic of the soul." 

''Eccola!'' I said, "was it like that? But a 
heady rhetoric is not inconsistent with sobriety 
of thought, as many a Victorian page we have 
read together testifies. The style tames with 
the spirit ; and wild blood is not the worst of 
faults in poets or boys. But I will change old 
coin for the new mintage with you, if you like, 
and it is not so very different. There is a 
good stretch ahead, and the ponies never seem 
to misbehave both at once." In fact, these 
ponies, who seemed to enjoy the broad, open 
world with us, had yet to learn the first lesson 
of civilization, and unite their private wills in 
rebellion ; for, while one or the other of them 
would from time to time fling back his heels 
and prepare to resist, the other dragged him 
into the course with the steady pace, and, 
under hand and voice, they kept going in a 



216 HEART OF MAN 

much less adventurous way than I had an- 
ticipated. And so I read a page or two from 
the small blank-book in which I used to write, 
saying only, by way of preface, that the April 
morning my friend so well remembered marked 
the time when I began that direct appeal to 
life of which these notes were the first- 
fruits. 

The waters of the Looking-glass had been 
lost behind its bluffs to the west as we turned 
inland, though we still rose with the slope of 
the valley ; and now on higher land we saw the 
open country in a broad sweep, but with bolder 
configuration than was familiar to me in prairie 
regions, the rolling of the country being in great 
swells; and this slight touch of strangeness, 
this accentuation of the motionless lines of 
height and hollow, and the general lift of the 
land, perhaps, was what jEirst gave that life to 
the soil, that sense of a presence in the earth 
itself, which was felt at a later time. Then I 
saw only the outspread region, with here and 
there a gleam of the grain on side-hills and 
far-curved embrasures of the folded slopes, or 
great stands of Indian corn, acres within acres, 
and hardly a human dwelling anywhere ; the 



THE EIDE m 

loneliness, the majesty, the untouched primi- 
tiveness of it, were the elements I remember ; 
and the wind, and the unclouded great expanse 
of the blue upper sky, like a separate element 
lifted in deep color over the gold of harvest, 
the green of earth, and the touches of brown 
road and soil. So, with pauses for common 
sights and things, and some word of comment 
and fuller statement and personal touches that 
do not matter now, I read my brief notes of 
life in its most sacred part. 

"The gift of life at birth is only a little 
breath on a baby's lips ; the air asks no consent 
to fill the lungs, the heart beats, the senses 
awaken, the mind begins, and the first hand- 
writing of life is a child's smile; but as boy- 
hood gathers fuller strength, and youth hives 
a more intimate sweetness, and manhood ex- 
pands in richer values, life is not less entirely 
a gift. As well say a self -born as a self-made 
man. Nature does not intrust to us her bod- 
ily processes and functions, and the fountains 
of feeling within well up, and the forms of 
thought define, without obligation to man's 
wisdom; body and soul alike are above his 



278 HEAET OF MAN 

will — our garment of sense comes from no 
human loom, nor were the bones of the spirit 
fashioned by any mortal hands; in our prog- 
ress and growth, too, bloom of health and 
charm of soul owe their loveliness to that law 
of grace that went forth with the creative 
word. Slow as men are to realize the fact 
and the magnitude of this great grant, and 
the supreme value of it as life itself in all its 
abundance of blessings, there comes a time to 
every generous and open heart when the youth 
is made aware of the stream of beneficence flow- 
ing in upon him from the forms and forces of 
nature with benedictions of beauty and vigour ; 
he knows, too, the cherishing of human service 
all about him in familiar love and the large 
brothering of man's general toil ; he begins to 
see, shaping itself in him, the vast tradition of 
the past, — its mighty sheltering of mankind in 
institution and doctrine and accepted hopes, its 
fostering agencies, its driving energies. What 
a breaking out there is then in him of the emo- 
tions that are fountain-heads of permanent life, 
— filial love, patriotic duty, man's passion for 
humanity ! It is then that he becomes a man. 
Strange would it be, if, at such tidal moments, 



THE RIDE 279 

the youth should not, in pure thankfulness, 
find out the Giver of all good ! 

''As soon as man thus knows himself a crea- 
ture, he has established a direct relation with 
the Creator, did he but realize it, — not in mere 
thought of some temporal creation, some ante- 
cedent fact of a beginning, but in immediate 
experience of that continuing act which keeps 
the universe in being, 

' Which wields the world with never wearied love, 
Sustains it from beneath and kindles it above/ — 

felt and known now in the life which, moment 
to moment, is his own. The extreme sense of 
this may take on the expression of the panthe- 
istic mood, as here in Shelley's words, without 
any logical irreverence : for pantheism is that 
great mood of the human spirit which it is, 
permanent, recurring in every age and race, as 
natural to Wordsworth as to Shelley, because of 
the fundamental character of these facts and 
the inevitability of the knowledge of them. 
The most arrogant thought of man, since it 
identifies him with deity, it springs from that 
same sense of insignificance which makes hu- 
mility the characteristic of religious life in all 



280 HEABT OF MAN 

its forms. A mind deeply penetrated with tLe 
feeling that all we take and all we are, our joys 
and the might and grace of life in us, are the 
mere lendings of mortality like Lear's rags, 
may come to think man the passive receptacle 
of power, and the instrument scarce distin- 
guishable from the hand that uses it ; the 
thought is as nigh to St. Paul as to Plato. 
This intimate and infinite sense of obligation 
finds its highest expression, on the secular 
side, and takes on the touch of mystery, in 
those great men of action who have believed 
themselves in a special manner servants of God, 
and in great poets who found some consecration 
in their calling. They, more than other men, 
know how small is any personal part in our 
labours and our wages alike. But in all men 
life comes to be felt to be, in itself and its in- 
struments, this gift, this debt ; to continue to 
live is to contract a greater debt in proportion 
to the greatness of the life ; it is greatest in the 
greatest. 

" This spontaneous gratitude is a vital thing. 
He who is most sensitive to beauty and prizes 
it, who is most quick to love, who is most ardent 
in the world's service, feels most constantly this 



THE RIDE 281 

power which enfolds him in its hidden infinity; 
he is overwhelmed by it : and how should 
gratitude for such varied and constant and ex- 
haustless good fail to become a part of the daily 
life of his spirit, deepening with every hour in 
which the value, the power and sweetness of 
life, is made more plain ? Yet at the same in- 
stant another and almost contrary mood is twin- 
born with this thankfulness, — the feeling of 
helplessness. Though the secret and inscruta- 
ble power, sustaining and feeding life, be truly 
felt,— 

' Closer is He than breathing and nearer than 
hands and feet/ — 

though in moments of life's triumphs it evokes 
this natural burst of happy gratitude, yet who 
can free himself from mortal fear, or dispense 
with human hope, however firm and irremova- 
ble may be his confidence in the beneficent 
order of God? And especially in the more 
strenuous trials of later ages for Christian per- 
fection in a world not Christian, and under the 
mysterious dispensation of nature, even the 
youth has lived little, and that shallowly, who 
does not crave companionship, guidance, pro- 



282 HEART OF MAN 

tection. Dependent as he feels himself to be 
for all he is and all he may become, the means 
of help — self-help even — and the law of it 
must be from that same power, whose efficient 
working he has recognized with a thankful 
heart. Where else shall he look except to that 
experience of exaltation during whose continu- 
ance he plucked a natural trust for the future, 
a reasonable belief in Providence, and a humble 
readiness to accept the partial ills of life? In 
life's valleys, then, as on its summits, in the 
darkness as in the light, he may retain that 
once confided trust ; not that he looks for mira- 
cle, or any specific and particularizing care, it 
may be, but that in the normal course of things 
he believes in the natural alliance of that arm 
of infinite power with himself. In depression, 
in trouble, in struggle, such as all life exhibits, 
he will be no more solitary than in his hours of 
blessing. Thus, through helplessness also, he 
establishes a direct relation with God, which is 
also a reality of experience, as vital in the cry 
for aid as in the offering of thanks. The grati- 
tude of the soul may be likened to that morn- 
ing prayer of the race which was little more 
than praise with uplifted hands ; the helpless- 



THE RIDE 283 

ness of man is rather the evening prayer of the 
Christian age, which with bowed head implores 
the grace of God to shield him through the 
night. These two, in all times, among all 
races, under ten thousand divinities, have been 
the voices of the heart. 

" There is a third mood of direct experience 
by which one approaches the religious life. 
Surely no man in our civilization can grow 
far in years without finding out that, in the 
effort to live a life obeying his desires and 
worthy of his hopes, his will is made one with 
Christ's commands ; and he knows that the 
promises of Christ, so far as they relate to 
the life that now is, are fulfilled in himself 
day by day; he can escape neither the ideal 
that Christ was, nor the wisdom of Christ in 
respect to the working of that ideal on others 
and within himself. He perceives the evil of 
the world, and desires to share in its redemp- 
tion; its sufferings, and would remove them; 
its injustice, and would abolish it. He is, by 
the mere force of his own heart in view of 
mankind, a humanitarian. But he is more 
than this in such a life. If he be sincere, he 
has not lived long before he knows in himself 



284 HEART OF MAN 

such default of duty that he recognizes it 
as the soul's betrayal ; its times and occa- 
sions, its degrees of responsibility, its character 
whether of mere frailty or of an evil will, its 
greater or less offence, are indifferent matters ; 
for, as it is the man of perfect honour who feels 
a stain as a wound, and a shadow as a stain, 
so poignancy of repentance is keenest in the 
purest souls. It is death that is dull, it is 
life that is quick. It may well be, in the 
world's history in our time, that the suffering 
caused in the good by slight defections from 
virtue far overbalances the general remorse felt 
for definite and habitual crime. Thus none — 
those least who are most hearts of conscience 

— escapes this emotion, known in the language 
of religion as conviction of sin. It is the earli- 
est moral crisis of the soul; it is widely felt, 

— such is the nature and such the circum- 
stances of men; and, as a man meets it in 
that hour, as he then begins to form the habit 
of dealing with his failures sure to come, so 
runs his life to the end save for some great 
change. If then some restoring power enters 
in, some saving force, whether it be from the 
memory and words of Christ, or from the 



THE EIDE 285 

example of those lives that were lived in 
the spirit of that ideal, or from nearer love 
and more tender affection enforcing the su- 
premacy of duty and the hope of struggle, — in 
whatever way that healing comes, it is well; 
and, just as the man of honest mind has rec- 
ognized the identity of his virtue with Christ's 
rule, and has verified in practice the wisdom 
of its original statement, so now he knows 
that this moral recovery, and its method, is 
what has been known on the lips of saint 
and sinner as the life of the Spirit in man, 
and even more specially he cannot discrimi- 
nate it from what the servants of Christ call 
the life of Christ in them. He has become 
more than a humanitarian through this experi- 
ence ; he is now himself one of those whom 
in the mass he pities and would help ; he has 
entered into that communion with his kind 
and kin which is the earthly seal of Christian 
faith. 

" Yet it seems to me a profound error in life 
to concentrate attention upon the moral expe- 
rience here described ; it is but initial ; and, 
though repeated, it remains only a beginning ; 
as the vast force of nature is put forth through 



286 HEART OF MAN 

health, and its curative power is an incident 
and subordinate, so the spiritual energy of life 
is made manifest, in the main, in the joy of 
the soul in so far as it has been made whole. 
A narrow insistence on the fact of sin distorts 
life, and saddens it both in one's own con- 
science and in his love for others. Sin is but 
a part of life, and it is far better to fix our 
eyes on the measureless good achieved in those 
lines of human effort which have either never 
been deflected from right aims, or have been 
brought back to the paths of advance, which 
I believe to be the greater part, both in indi- 
vidual lives of noble intention, and in the 
Christian nations. Sin loses half its dismay- 
ing power, and evil is stripped of its terrors, 
if one recognizes how far ideal motives enter 
with controlling influence into personal life, 
and to what a degree ideal destinies are already 
incarnate in the spirit of great nations. 

''However this may be, I find on examina- 
tion of man's common experience these three 
things, which establish, it seems to me, a direct 
relation between him and God : this spontane- 
ous gratitude, this trustful dependence, this 
noble practice, which is, historically, the Chris- 



THE EIDE 287 

tian life, and is characterized by its distinc- 
tive experiences. They are simple elements : a 
faith in God's being which has not cared fur- 
ther to define the modes of that being; a 
hope which has not grown to specify even a 
Resurrection ; a love that has not concentrated 
itself through limitation upon any instrumen- 
tal conversion of the world; but, inchoate as 
they are, they remain faith, hope, love — these 
three. Are they not sufficient to be the begin- 
nings of the religious life in the young? To 
theological learning, traditional creeds, and 
conventional worship they may seem primitive, 
slight in substance, meagre in apparel; but 
one who is seeking, not things to believe, but 
things to live, desires the elementary. In 
setting forth first principles, the elaboration 
of a more highly organized knowledge may 
be felt as an obscuration of truth, an impedi- 
ment to certainty, a hindrance in the effort to 
touch and handle the essential matter; and 
for this reason a teacher dispenses with much 
in his exposition, just as in talking to a child a 
grown man abandons nine-tenths of his vocab- 
ulary. In the same way, learning as a child, 
seeking in the life of the soul with God wliat 



288 HEART OF MAN 

is normal, vital, and universal, the beginner 
need not feel poor and balked, because he 
does not avail himself as yet of resources that 
belong to length of life, breadth of scholar- 
ship, intellectual power, the saint's ardour, the 
seer's insight. 

"The spiritual life here defined, elementary 
as it is, appears inevitable, part and parcel of 
our natural being. Why should this be sur- 
prising? Surely if there be a revelation of 
the divine at all, it must be one independent 
of external things ; one that comes to all by 
virtue of their human nature ; one that is 
direct, and not mediately given through others. 
Faith that is vital is not the fruit of things 
told of, but of things experienced. It follows 
that religion may be essentially free from any 
admixture of the past in its communication to 
the soul. It cannot depend on events of a 
long-past time now disputable, or on books of 
a far-off and now alien age. These things are 
the tradition and history of the spiritual life, 
but not the life. To the mass of men religion 
derived from such sources would be a belief 
in other men's experience, and for most of 
them would rest on proofs they cannot scruti- 



THE RIDE 289 

nize. It would be a religion of authority, not 
of personal and intimate conviction. Just as 
creation may be felt, not as some far-off event, 
but a continuing act, revelation itself is a pres- 
ent reality. Do not the heavens still declare 
the glory of God as when they spoke to the 
Psalmist ? and has the light that lighteth every 
man who is born into the world ceased to burn 
in the spirit since the first candle was lit on 
a Christian altar? If the revelation of glory 
and mercy be an everlasting thing, and inex- 
tinguishable save in the life itself, then only 
is that direct relation of man with God, this 
vital certainty in living truth, — living in us, — 
this personal religion, possible. 

" What has reform in religion ever been other 
than the demolition of the interfering barriers, 
the deposit of the past, between man and God ? 
The theory of the office of the Holy Spirit in 
the Church expresses man's need of direct 
contact with the divine ; the doctrine of tran- 
substantiation symbolizes it ; and what is 
Puritanism in all ages, affirming the pure 
spirit, denying all forms, but the heart of 
man in his loneliness, seeking God face to 
face? what is its iconoclasm of image and 



290 HEART OF MAN 

altar, of prayer-book and ritual, of the Coun- 
cils and the Fathers, but the assertion of the 
noble dignity in each individual soul by virtue 
of which it demands a freeman's right of audi- 
ence, a son's right of presence with his father, 
and believes that such is God's way with his 
own? This immediacy of the religious life, 
being once accepted as the substance of vitality 
in it, relieves man at once of the greater mass 
of that burden in which scepticism thrives and 
labours. The theories of the past respecting 
God's government, no longer possible in a 
humaner and Christianized age, the impaired 
genuineness of the Scriptures and all ques- 
tions of their text and accuracy, even the 
great doctrine of miracles, cease to be of vital 
consequence. A man may approach divine 
truth without them. Simple and bare as the 
spiritual life here presented is, it is not open 
to such sceptical attack, being the fundamen- 
tal revelation of God bound up in the very 
nature of man which has been recognized at 
so many critical times, in so many places and 
ages, as the inward light. We may safely 
leave dogma and historical criticism and sci- 
entific discovery on one side ; it is not in them 



THE RIDE 291 

that man finds this inward wisdom, but in the 
religious emotions as they naturally arise under 
the influence of life. 

"This view is supported rather than weak- 
ened by such records of the spiritual life in 
man as we possess. Man's nature is one ; and, 
just as it is interpreted and illuminated by the 
poets from whom we derive direction in our 
general conduct, it is set forth and illustrated 
by saintly men and holy women in the special 
sphere of the soul's life with God. Our nature 
is one with theirs ; but as there are differences 
in the aptitudes, sensibilities, and fates of all 
men, so is it with spiritual faculties and their 
growth,; and, from time to time, men have 
arisen of such intense nature, so sensitive to 
religious emotions, so developed in religious 
experience, through instinct, circumstance, and 
power, that they can aid us by the example 
and precept of their lives. To them belongs 
a respect similar to that paid to poets and 
thinkers. Yet it is because they tell us what 
they have seen and touched, not what they 
have heard, — what they have lived and shown 
forth in acts that bear testimony to their 
words, that they have this power. Such were 



292 HEART OF MAN 

St. Augustine, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Thomas 
a Kempis, and many a humbler name whose 
life's story has come into our hands ; such were 
the Apostles, and, preeminently, Christ. It is 
the reality of the life in them, personal, direct, 
fundamental, that preserves their influence in 
other lives. They help us by opening and 
directing the spiritual powers we have in 
common ; and beyond our own experience we 
believe in their counsels as leading to what 
we in our turn may somewhat attain to in the 
life they followed. It is not what they believed 
of God, but what God accomplished in them, 
that holds our attention ; and we interpret it 
only by what ourselves have known of his deal- 
ing with us. It is life, and the revelation of 
God there contained, that in others or ourselves 
is the root of the matter — God in us. This is 
the corner stone." 

The sun was high in the heavens when we 
ceased talking of these matters and saw in a 
lowland before us a farmhouse, where we 
stopped. It was a humble dwelling — almost 
the humblest — partly built of sod, with a barn 
near by, and nothing to distinguish it except 



THE RIDE 293 

the sign, ^'Post Office," which showed it was 
the centre of this neighborhood, if " the blank 
miles round about" could be so called. We 
were made welcome, and, the ponies being fed 
and cared for, we sat down with the farmer 
and his wife and the small brood of young 
children, sharing their noonday meal. It was 
a rude table and a lowly roof ; but, when I 
arose, I was glad to have been at such a board, 
taking a stranger's portion, but not like a 
stranger. It was to be near the common lot, 
and the sense of it was as primitive as the 
smell of the upturned earth in spring ; it had 
the wholesomeness of life in it. Going out, I 
lay down on the ground and talked with the 
little boy, some ten years old, to whom our 
coming was evidently an event of importance ; 
and I remember asking him if he ever saw 

a city. He had been once, he said, to 

— the hamlet, as I thought it, which we had 
just left — with his father in the farm- wagon. 
That was his idea of the magnificence of cities. 
I could not but look at him curiously. Here 
was the creature, just like other boys, who 
knew less of the look of man's world than any 
one I had ever encountered. To him this over- 



294 HEART OF MAN 

stretching silent sky, this vacant rolling reach 
of earth, and home, were all of life. What 
a waif of existence ! — but the ponies being 
ready, we said our good-byes and drove on 
along fainter tracks, still northward. We 
talked for a while in that spacious atmosphere 
— the cheerful talk, half personal, half literary, 
lightly humorous, too, which we always had 
together ; but tiring of it at last, and the boy 
still staying in my mind as a kind of accidental 
symbol of that isolated being whom my notes 
had described, and knowing that I had told but 
half my story and that my friend would like 
the rest, I turned the talk again on the serious 
things, saying — and there was nothing surpris- 
ing in such a change with us — "After all, you 
know, we can't live to ourselves alone or by 
ourselves. How to enter life and be one with 
other men, how to be the child of society, and 
a peer there, belongs to our duty ; and to escape 
from the solitude of private life is the most 
important thing for men of lonely thought and 
feeling, such as meditation breeds. There is 
more of it, if you will listen again ; " and he, 
with the sparkle in his eyes, and the youthful 
happiness in the new things of life for us, — 



THE RIDE 295 

new as if they had not been lived a thousand 
years before, — listened like a child to a story, 
grave as the matter was, which I read again 
from the memoranda I had made, after that 
April morning, year by year. 

"Respect for age is the natural religion of 
childhood ; it becomes in men a sentiment of 
the soul. An obscure melancholy, the pathos 
of human fate, mingles with this instinctive 
feeling. The fascination of the sea, the sub- 
limity of mountains, are indebted to it, as well 
as the beautiful and solemn stars, which, like 
them, the mind does not distinguish from eter- 
nal things, and has ever invested with sacred 
awe. It is the sense of our mortality that thus 
exalts nature. Yet before her antiquity merely, 
veneration is seldom full and perfect; her 
periods are too impalpable, and, in contemplat- 
ing their vastness, amazement dissipates our 
faculties. Rather some sign of human occu- 
pancy, turning the desert into a neglected gar- 
den, is necessary to give emotional colour and 
the substance of thought ; some touch of man's 
hand that knows a writing beyond nature's 
can add what centuries could not give, and 



296 HEAET OF MAN 

makes a rock a monument. The Mediterranean 
islet is older for the pirate tower that caps it, 
and for us the ivied church, with its shadowed 
graves, makes England ancestral soil. Nor is 
it only such landmarks of time that bring this 
obscure awe ; occupations, especially, awake it, 
and customary ceremonies, and all that enters 
into the external tradition of life, handed down 
from generation to generation. On the West- 
ern prairies I have felt rather the permanence 
of human toil than the newness of the land. 

" The sense of age in man's life, relieved, as 
it is, on the seeming agelessness of nature, is a 
meditation on death, deep-set far below thought. 
We behold the sensible conquests of death, and 
the sight is so habitual, and remains so mys- 
terious, that it leaves its imprint less in the 
conscious and reflective mind than in tempera- 
ment, sentiment, imagination, and their hidden 
stir; the pyramids then seem fossils of mankind; 
Stonehenge, Indian mounds, and desolate cities 
are like broken anchors caught in the sunken 
reef and dull ooze of time's ocean, lost relics of 
their human charge long vanished away. Star- 
tling it is, when the finger of time has touched 
what we thought living, and we find in some 



THE BIDE 297 

solitary place the face of stone. I learned this 
lesson on the low marshes of Ravenna, where, 
among the rice-iields and the thousands of 
white pond lilies, stands a lonely cathedral, 
from whose ruined sides Christianity, in the 
face and figure it wore before it put on the 
form and garb of a world-wide religion, looked 
down on me with the unknown eyes of an 
alien and Oriental faith. ' Stranger, why lin- 
gerest thou in this broken tomb,' I seemed to 
hear from silent voices in that death of time ; 
and still, when my thoughts seek the Mother- 
Church of Christendom, they go, not to St. John 
Lateran by the Roman wall, but are pilgrims 
to the low marshes, the white water lilies, the 
lone Byzantine ruin that even the sea has long 
abandoned. 

'' The Mother-Church? — is then this personal 
religious life only a state of orphanage ? Be- 
cause true life necessarily begins in the inde- 
pendent self, must it continue without the 
sheltering of the traditional past, the instructed 
guidance of elder wisdom, and man's joint life 
in common which by association so enlarges 
and fortifies the individual good ? Why should 
one not behave with respect to religion as he 



298 HEART OF MAN 

does in other parts of life? It is our habit 
elsewhere in all quarters to recognize beyond 
ourselves an ampler knowledge, a maturer 
judgment, a more efficient will enacting our 
own choice. To obey by force is a childish 
or a slavish act, but intelligently and willingly 
to accept authority within just limits is the 
reasonable and practical act of a free man in 
society ; the recognition of this by a youth 
marks his attainment of intellectual majority. 
Authority, in all its modes, is the bond of the 
commonwealth ; until the youth comprehends 
it he is a ward ; thereafter he is either a rebel 
or a citizen, as he lists. For us, born to the 
largest measure of freedom society has ever 
known, there is little fear lest the principle of 
authority should prove a dangerous element. 
The right of private judgment, which is, I 
believe, the vital principle of the intellectual 
life, is the first to be exercised by our young 
men who lead that life ; and quite in the spirit 
of that education which would repeat in the 
child the history of the race, we are scarce out 
of the swaddling bands of the primer and cate- 
chism before we would remove all questions to 
the court of our own jurisdiction. Tlie mind is 



THE EIDE 299 

not a tabula rasa at birth, we learn, but, so soon 
as may be, we will remedy that, and erase all 
records copied there. The treasure doors of 
our fathers' inheritance are thrown open to us ; 
but we will weigh each gold piece with balance 
and scale. All that libraries contain, all that 
institutions embody, all the practice of life 
which, in its innocence, mankind has adopted 
as things of use and wont, shall be certified by 
our scrutiny. So in youth we say, and what 
results ? What do the best become ? Incapa- 
bles, detached from the sap of life, forced to 
escape to the intellectual limbo of a suspension 
of judgment, extending till it fills heaven and 
earth. We no longer discuss opinions even; 
the most we can attain to is an attitude of 
mind. In view of the vast variety of phases 
in which even man's great ideas have been 
held, a sense of indifference among them, a 
vacuity in all, grows up. Pilate's question, 
'What is truth?' ends all. 

"This is the extreme penalty of the heroic 
sceptical resolve in strong and constant minds ; 
commonly those who would measure man's large 
scope by the gauge of their own ability and 
experience fall into such idiosyncrasy as is the 



300 HEART OF MAN 

fruitful mother of sects, abortive social schemes, 
and all the various brood of dwarfed life ; but, 
for most men, the pressure of life itself, which 
compels them, like Descartes, doubting the 
world, to live as if it were real, corrects their 
original method of independence. They find 
that to use authority is the better part of wis- 
dom, much as to employ men belongs to prac- 
tical statecraft ; and they learn the reasonable 
share of the principle of authority in life. 
They accept, for example, the testimony of 
others in matters of fact, and their mental 
results in those subjects with which such men 
are conversant, on the ground of a just faith in 
average human capacity in its own sphere ; 
and, in particular, they accept provisional opin- 
ions, especially such as are alleged to be verifi- 
able in action, and they put them to the test. 
This is our habit in all parts of secular life — 
in scholarship and in practical affairs. ' If any 
man will do His will, he shall know of the doc- 
trine, whether it be of God,' is only a special 
instance of this law of temporary acceptance 
and experiment in all life. It is a reasonable 
command. The confusion of human opinion 
largely arises from the fact that the greater 



THE RIDE 301 

part of it is unverifiable, owing to the deficient 
culture or opportunity of those who hold it; 
and the persistency with which such opinion is 
argued, clung to, and cherished, is the cause of 
many of the permanent differences that array 
men in opposition. The event would dispense 
with the argument ; but in common life, which 
knows far more of the world than it has in its 
own laboratory, much lies beyond the reach of 
such real solution. It is the distinction of vital 
religious truth that it is not so withdrawn from 
true proof, but is near at hand in the daily life 
open to all. 

"Such authority, then, as is commonly 
granted in science, politics, or commerce to 
the past results and expectations of men bring- 
ing human life in these provinces down to our 
time and delivering it, not as a new, but as an 
incomplete thing, into the hands of our genera- 
tion, we may yield also in religion. The lives 
of the saints and all those who in history have 
illustrated the methods and results of piety, 
their convictions, speculations, and hopes, their 
warning and encouragement, compose a great 
volume of instruction, illustration, and educa- 
tion of the religious life. It is folly to ignore 



302 HEART OF MAN 

this, as it would be to ignore the alphabet of 
letters, the Arabic numerals, or the Constitu- 
tion ; for, as these are the monuments of past 
achievement and an advantage we have at our 
start over savage man, so in religion there are 
as well established results of life already lived. 
Though the religious life be personal, it is not 
more so than all life of thought and emotion ; 
and in it we do not begin at the beginning of 
time any more than in other parts of life. We 
begin with an inheritance of many experiments 
hitherto, of many methods, of a whole race- 
history of partial error, partial truth ; and we 
take up the matter where our fathers laid it 
down, with the respect due to their earnest 
toil, their sincere effort and trial, their convic- 
tions ; and the youth who does not feel their 
impressiveness as enforcing his responsibility 
has as nascent a life in religion as he would 
have, in the similar case, in learning or in 
citizenship. 

''The question of authority in the religious 
life, however, is more specific than this, and is 
not to be met by an admission of the general 
respect due to the human past and its choicer 
spirits, and our dependence thereon for the fos- 



THE RIDE 303 

tering of instinctive impulses, direction, and 
the confirmation of our experience. It is or- 
ganized religion that here makes its claim to 
fealty, as organized liberty, organized justice 
do, in man's communal life. There is a joint 
and general consent in the masses of men with 
similar experience united into the Church, with 
respect to the religious way of life, similar to 
that of such masses united into a government 
with respect to secular things. The history of 
the Church with its embodied dogmas — the 
past of Christendom — contains that consent ; 
and the Church founds its claim to veneration 
on this broad accumulation of experience, so 
gathered from all ages and all conditions of 
men as to have lost all traces of individuality 
and become the conviction of mankind to a 
degree that no free constitution and no legal 
code can claim. To substitute the simple faith 
of the young heart, however immediate, in the 
place of this hoary and commanding tradition 
is a daring thing, and may seem both arro- 
gance and folly ; to stand apart from it, though 
willing to be taught within the free exercise of 
our own faculties, abashes us ; and it is neces- 
sary, for our own self-respect, to adopt some 



304 HEART OF MAN 

attitude toward the Church definitely, not as a 
part of the common mass of race-tradition in 
a diffused state like philosophy, but as an insti- 
tution like the Throne or the Parliament. 

"But may it not be pleaded that, however 
slight by comparison personal life may seem, 
yet if it be true, the Church must include this 
in its own mighty sum ; and that what the 
Church adds to define, expand, and elevate, to 
guide and support, belongs to growth in spirit- 
ual things, not to those beginnings which only 
are here spoken of? And in defence of a pri- 
vate view and hesitancy, such as is also felt in 
the organized social life elsewhere, may it not 
be suggested that the past of Christendom, 
great as it is in mental force, moral ardour, and 
spiritual insight, and illustrious with triumphs 
over evil in man and in society, and shining 
always with the leading of a great light, is yet 
a human past, an imperfect stage of progress 
at every era? Is its historic life, with all its 
accumulation of creed and custom, not a process 
of Christianization, in which much has been 
sloughed off at every new birth of the world ? 
In reading the Fathers we come on states of 
mind and forms of emotion due to transitory 



THE KIDE 305 

influences and surroundings ; and in the his- 
tory of the Church, we come upon dogmas, 
ceremonials, methods of work and aims of 
effort, which were of contemporary validity 
only. Such are no longer rational or possible ; 
they have passed out of life, belonging to that 
body of man which is forever dying, not to the 
spirit that is forever growing ; and, too, as all 
men and bodies of men share in imperfection, 
we come, in the Fathers and in the Church, 
upon passions, persecutions, wars, vices, degra- 
dation, and failure, necessarily to be accounted 
as a portion of the admixture of sin and wrong, 
of evil, in the whole of man's historic life. In 
view of these obvious facts, and also of the 
great discrepancies of such organic bodies as 
are here spoken of in their total mass as the 
Church, and of their emphasis upon such par- 
ticularities, is not an attitude of reserve justi- 
fiable in a young and conscientious heart? It 
may seem to be partial scepticism, especially as 
the necessity for rejection of some portion of 
this embodied past becomes clearer in the 
growth of the mind's information and the 
strengthening of moral judgment in a rightful 
independence. But if much must be cast away, 



306 HEAKT OF MAN 

let it not disturb us; it must be the more in 
proportion as the nature of man suffers redemp- 
tion. Let us own, then, and reverence the 
great tradition of the Church ; but he has 
feebly grasped the idea of Christ leavening the 
world, and has read little in the records of 
pious ages even, who does not know that even 
in the Church it is needful to sift truth from 
falsehood, dead from living truth. 

"If, however, a claim be advanced which 
forbids such a use of reason as we make in 
regard to all other human institutions, viewing 
them historically with reference to their con- 
stant service to mankind and their particular 
adaptation to a changing social state ; if, as was 
the case with the doctrine of the Divine Right 
of Kings, the Church proclaims a commission 
not subject to human control, by virtue of 
which it would impose creed and ritual, and 
assumes those great offices, reserved in Puritan 
thought to God only, — then does it not usurp 
the function of the soul itself, suppress the 
personal revelation of the divine by taking 
from the soul the seals of original sover- 
eignty, remove God to the first year of our era, 
relying on his mediate revelation in time, and 



THE RIDE 307 

thus take from common man the evidence 
of religion and therewith its certainty, and 
in general substitute faith in things for the 
vital faith? If the voice of the Church is 
to find only its own echo in the inner voice of 
life, if its evidences of religion involve more 
than is near and present to every soul by virtue 
of its birth, if its rites have any other reality 
than that of the heart which expresses itself in 
them and so gives them life and significance, 
then its authority is external wholly and has 
nothing in common with that authority which 
free men erect over themselves because it is 
themselves embodied in an outward principle. 
If personality has any place in the soul, if the 
soul has any original office, then the authority 
that religion as an organic social form may 
take on must lie within limits that reserve to 
the soul its privacy with God, to truth an un- 
borrowed radiance, and to all men its possession, 
simple or learned, lay or cleric, through their 
common experience and ordinary faculties in 
the normal course of life. Otherwise, it seems 
to me, personal experience cannot be the begin- 
ning of Christian conviction, the true available 
test of it, the underlying basis of it as we build 



308 HEABT OF MAN 

the temple of God's presence within us, and, as 
I have called it, the vitality of the whole matter. 
"Within these limits, then, imposed by the 
earlier argument, what, under such reserves 
of the great principles of liberty, democracy, 
and justice in which we are bred and which 
are forms of the cardinal fact of the value of 
the personal soul in all men, — what to us is 
the office of the Church ? In theology it de- 
fines a philosophy which, though an interpre- 
tation of divine truth, takes its place in the 
intellectual scheme of theory like other human 
philosophies, and has a similar value, differing 
only in the gravity of its subject-matter, which 
is the most mysterious known to thought. In 
its specific rites it dignifies the great moments 
of life — birth, marriage, and death — with its 
solemn sanctions ; and in its general ceremonies 
it affords appropriate forms in which religious 
emotion finds noble and tender expression ; es- 
pecially it enables masses of men to unite in one 
great act of the heart with the impressiveness 
that belongs to the act of a community, and to 
make that act, though emotional in a multitude 
of hearts, single and whole in manifestation; 
and it does this habitually in the life of its least 



THE BIDE 309 

groups by Sabbath observances, and in the life 
of nations by public thanksgivings, and in the 
life of entire Christendom by its general feasts 
of Christmas and Easter, and, though within 
narrower limits, by its seasons of fasting and 
prayer. In its administration it facilitates its 
daily work among men. The Church is thus a 
mighty organizer of thought in theology, of the 
forms of emotion in its ritual, and of practical 
action in its executive. Its doctrines, however 
conflicting in various divisions of the whole vast 
body, are the result of profound, conscientious, 
and long-continued thought among its succes- 
sive synods, which are the custodians of creeds 
as senates are of constitutions, and whose affir- 
mations and interpretations have a like weight 
in their own speculative sphere as these possess 
in the province of political thought age after 
age. Its counsels are ripe with a many-cen- 
turied knowledge of human nature. Its joys 
and consolations are the most precious inheri- 
tance of the heart of man. Its saints open our 
pathways, and go before, following in the Avays 
of the spirit. Its doors concentrate within their 
shelter the general faith, and give it there a 
home. Its table is spread for all men» I do 



310 HEART OF MAN 

not speak of the Church. Invisible, but mean to 
embrace with this catholicity of statement all 
organizations, howsoever divided, which own 
Christ as their Head. Temple, cathedral, and 
chapel have each their daily use to those who 
gather there with Christian hearts ; each is a 
living fountain to its own fold. The village 
spire, wherever it rises on American or English 
ground, bespeaks an association of families 
who find in this bond an inward companion- 
ship and outward expression of it in a public 
habit continuing from the fathers down, sancti- 
fied by the memories of generations gone, and 
tender with the hope of the generation to come ; 
and this is of measureless good within such 
families for young and old alike. It bespeaks 
also an instrument of charity, unobtrusive, 
friendly, and searching, and growing more and 
more unconfined ; it bespeaks a rock of public 
morality deep-set in the foundations of the 
state. 

"It is true that in uniting with such a 
Church, under the specific conditions natural to 
both temperament and residence, a man yields 
something of private right, and sacrifices in a 
greater or less degree his personality ; but this 



THE RIDE 311 

is the common condition of all social coopera- 
tion, whether in party action or any union to 
a common end. The compromise, involved in 
any platform of principles, tolerates essential 
differences in important matters, but matters 
not then important in view of what is to be 
gained in the main. The advantages of an 
organized religious life are too plain to be 
ignored; it is reasonable to go to the very 
verge in order to avail of them, both for a 
man's self and for his efficiency in society, just 
as it is to unite with a general party in the 
state, and serve it in local primaries, for the 
ends of citizenship ; such means of help and 
opportunities of accomplishment are not to be 
lightly neglected. Happy is he who, christened 
at the font, naturally accepts the duties de- 
volved upon him, and stands in his parents' 
place ; and fortunate I count the youth who, 
without stress and trouble, undertakes in his 
turn his father's part. But some there are, born 
of that resolute manliness of the fathers, which is 
finer than tempered steel, and of the conscience 
of the mothers which is more sensitive than 
the bare nerve, — the very flower of the Puritan 
tradition, and my heart goes out to them. And 



312 HEART OF MAN 

if there be a youth in our days who feels hesi- 
tancy in such an early surrender into the bosom 
of a Church, however broadly inclusive of firm 
consciences, strong heads, and free hearts ; if 
primitive Puritanism is bred in his bone and 
blood and is there the large reserve of liberty 
natural to the American heart ; if the spirit is 
so living in him that he dispenses with the form, 
which to those of less strenuous strain is rather 
a support ; if truth is so precious to him that 
he will not subscribe to more or less than he 
believes, or tolerate in inclusive statements 
speculative and uncertain elements, traditional 
error, and all that body of rejected doctrine 
which, though he himself be free from it, 
must yet be slowly uprooted from the general 
belief; if emotion is so sacred to him that 
his native and habitual reticence becomes so 
sensitive in this most private part of life as 
to make it here something between God and 
him only ; if his heart of charity and hand of 
friendship find out his fellow-men with no in- 
tervention ; if for these reasons, or any of them, 
or if from that modesty of nature, which is so 
much more common in American youth than is 
believed, he hesitates, out of pure awe of the 



THE EIDE 313 

responsibility before God and man which he 
incurs, to think himself worthy of such vows, 
such hopes, such duties, — if in any way, being 
of noble nature, he keeps by himself, — let him 
not think he thereby withdraws from the life of 
Christendom, nor that in the Church itself he 
may not still take some portion of its great 
good. So far as its authority is of the heart 
only, so far as it has organized the religious 
life itself without regard to other ends and 
free from intellectual, historical, and govern- 
mental entanglements that are supplementary 
at most, he needs no formal act to be one with 
its spirit; and, however much he may deny 
himself by his self-limitation, he remains a 
Christian." 

There was no doubt about it ; we were lost. 
The faint tracks in the soil had long ago 
disappeared, and we followed, as was natural, 
the draws between the slopes ; and now, 
for the last quarter-hour, the grass had deep- 
ened till it was above the wheels and to the 
shoulders of the ponies. They did not mind ; 
they were born to it. What solitude there was 
in it, as we pulled up and came to a stand I 



314 HEART OF MAN 

What wildness was there ! Only the great 
blue sky, with a westward dropping sun of 
lonely splendour, and green horizons, broken 
and nigh, of the waving prairie, whispering 
with the high wind, — and no life but ours shut 
in among the group of low, close hills all about, 
in that grassy gulf! The earth seemed near, 
waiting for us ; in such places, just like this, 
men lost had died and none knew it; half- 
unconsciously I found myself thinking of 
Childe Roland's Tower, — 

*' those two hills on the right 
Couched,'^ — 

and the reality of crossing the prairie in old 
days came back on me. That halt in the cup 
of the hills was our limit ; it was a moment of 
life, an arrival, an end. 

The sun was too low for further adventur- 
ing. We struck due west on as straight a 
course as the rugged country permitted, think- 
ing to reach the Looking-glass creek, along 
which lay the beaten road of travel back to 
mankind. An hour or two passed, and we saw 
a house in the distance to which we drove, — a 
humble house, sod-built, like that we had made 



THE EIDE 316 

our nooning in. We drove to the door, and 
called ; it was long before any answer came ; 
but at last a woman opened the door, her face 
and figure the very expression of dulled toil, 
hard work, bodily despair. Alone on that 
prairie, one would have thought she would 
have welcomed a human countenance ; but she 
looked on us as if she wished we would be 
gone, and hardly answered to our question of 
the road. She was the type of the abandon- 
ment of human life. I did not speak to her; 
but I see her now, as I saw her then, with a 
kind of surprise that a woman could come to 
be, by human life, like that. There was no 
one else in the house ; and she shut the door 
upon us after one sullen look and one scant 
sentence, as if we, and any other, were naught, 
and went back to her silence in that green 
waste, now gilded by the level sun, miles on 
miles. I have often thought of her since, and 
what life was to her there, and found some 
image of other solitudes — and men and women 
in them — as expansive, as alienating as the 
wild prairie, where life hides itself, grows de- 
humanized, and dies. 

We drove on, with some word of this ; and. 



316 HEART OF MAN 

eating what we had with us in case of famine, 
made our supper from biscuit and flask ; arid, 
before darkness fell, we struck the creek road, 
and turned southward, — a splendour of late 
sunset gleaming over the untravelled western 
bank, and dying out in red bloom and the 
purple of slow star-dawning overhead; and 
on we drove, with a hard road under us, 
having far to go. At the first farmhouse we 
watered the willing ponies, who had long suc- 
cumbed to our control, and who went as if 
they could not tire, steadily and evenly, under 
the same strong hand and kindly voice they had 
felt day-long. It was then I took the reins 
for an easy stretch, giving my friend a change, 
and felt what so unobservably he had been 
doing all day with wrist and eye, while he 
listened. So we drove down, and knew the 
moon was up by the changed heavens, though 
yet unseen behind the bluffs of the creek upon 
our left ; and far away southward, in the even- 
ing light, lay the long valley like a larger river. 
We still felt the upland, however, as a loftier 
air; and always as, when night comes, nature 
exercises some mysterious magic of the dark 
hour in strange places, there, as all day long, 



THE RIDE 317 

we seemed to draw closer to earth — not earth 
as it is in landscape, a thing of beauty and 
colour and human kinship, but earth, the soil, 
the element, the globe. 

This was in both our minds, and I had 
thought of it before he spoke after a long 
pause over the briar pipes that had comraded 
our talk since morning. "I can't talk of it 
now," he said ; " it's gone into me in an hour 
that you have been years in thinking ; but that 
is what you are to us." I say the things he 
said, for I cannot otherwise give his way, and 
that trust of love in which these thoughts were 
born on my lips; all those years, in many a 
distant place, I had thought for him almost as 
much as for myself. ''You knighted us," he 
said, "and we fight your cause," — not know- 
ing that kingship, however great or humble, is 
but the lowly knights made one in him who by 
God's grace can speak the word. " I have no 
doubt it's true, what you say ; but it is differ- 
ent. I expected it would be ; but we used to 
speak of nature more than the soul, and of 
nature's being a guide. Poor Robin, I remem- 
ber, began with that." "There is a sonnet of 
Arnold's you know," I answered, "that tells 



318 HEART OF MAN 

another tale. But I did not learn it from him. 
And, besides, what else he has to say is not 
cheerful. Nothing is wise," I interjected, " that 
is not cheerful." 

But without repeating the wandering talk of 
reality with its changeful tones, — and how- 
ever serious the matter might be it was never 
far from a touch of lightness shuttling in and out 
like sunshine, — I told him, as we drove down the 
dark valley, my hand resting now on his shoul- 
der near me, how nature is antipodal to the 
soul ; or, if not the antipodes, is apart from us, 
and cares not for the virtues we have erected, 
for authority and mercy, for justice, chastity, 
and sacrifice, for nothing that is man's except 
the life of the body itself, the race-life, as if 
man were a chemical element or a wave-motion 
of ether that are parts of physics. "I con- 
vinced myself," I said, " that the soul is not a 
term in the life of nature, but that nature is 
in it as a physical vigour and to it an out- 
ward spectacle, whereby the soul acquires a 
preparation for immortality, whether immor- 
tality come or not. And I have sometimes 
thought," I continued, "that on the spiritual 
side an explanation of the inequalities of 



THE RIDE 319 

human conditions, both past and present, may- 
be contained in the idea that for all alike, lowly 
and lofty, wretched and fortunate, simple and 
learned, life remains in all its conditions an 
opportunity to know God and exercise the 
soul in virtue, and is an education of the 
soul in all its essential knowledge and facul- 
ties, at least within Christian times, broadly 
speaking, and in more than one pagan civili- 
zation. Material success, fame, wealth, and 
power — birth even, with all it involves of 
opportunity and fate — are insignificant, if the 
soul's life is thus secured. I do not mean that 
such a thought clears the mystery of the differ- 
ent lots of mankind; but it suggests another 
view of the apparent injustice of the world 
in its most rigid forms. This, however, is a 
wandering thought. The great reversal of the 
law of nature in the soul lies in the fact that 
whereas she proceeds by the selfish will of the 
strongest trampling out the weak, spiritual law 
requires the best to sacrifice itself for the least. 
Scientific ethics, which would chloroform the 
feeble, can never succeed until the race makes 
bold to amend what it now receives as the 
mysterious ways of heaven, and identifies a de- 



320 HEART OF MAN 

generate body with a dead soul. Such a code 
is at issue with true democracy, which requires 
that every soul, being equal in value in view 
of its unknown future, shall receive the benefit 
of every doubt in earthly life, and be left as a 
being in the hands of the secret power that 
ordained its existence in the hour when nature 
was constituted to be its mode of birth, con- 
sciousness, and death. And if the choice must 
be made on the broad scale, it is our practical 
faith that the service of the best, even to the 
point of death, is due to the least in the hope 
of bettering the lot of man. Hence, as we are 
willing that in communities the noblest should 
die for a cause, we consent to the death of high 
civilizations, if they spread in some Helleniza- 
tion of a Roman, some Romanizing of a barbaric 
world; and to the extinction of aristocracies, if 
their virtues thereby are disseminated and the 
social goods they monopolized made common 
in a people; and to the falling of the flower of 
man's spirit everywhere, if its seeds be sown 
on all the winds of the future for the blessing 
of the world's fuller and more populous life. 
Such has been the history of our civilization, and 
still is, and must be till the whole earth's sur- 



THE EIDE 321 

face be conquered for mankind, embodied in its 
highest ideals, personal and social. This is not 
nature's way, who raises her trophy over the 
slain; our trophy is man's laurel upon our 
grave. So, everywhere except in the physical 
sphere of life, if you would find the soul's com- 
mands, reverse nature's will. This superiority 
to nature, as it seems to me, this living in an 
element plainly antithetical to her sphere, is a 
sign of 'an ampler ether, a diviner air.' " 

So I spoke, as the words came to me, while 
we were still driving down the dark valley, in 
deeper shadows, under higher bluffs, looking 
out on a levelled world westward, stretching 
off with low, white, wreathing mists and moonlit 
distances of plains beyond the further bank. 
We turned a great shoulder of the hills, and 
the moon shone out bright and clear, riding in 
heaven ; and the southward reach unlocked, 
and gave itself for miles to our eyes. At the 
instant, while the ponies came back upon their 
haunches at the drop of the long descent 
ahead, we both cried out, '' the Looking-glass ! " 
There it was, about a mile away before and 
below us, as plain as a pikestaff, — a silvery 
reach, like a long narrow lake, smooth as the 



322 HEART OF MAN 

floor of cloud seen from above among moun- 
tains, silent, motionless, — for all the world like 
an immense, spectral looking-glass, set there 
in the half -darkened waste. It was evidently 
what gave the name to the creek, and I have 
since noticed the same name elsewhere in the 
Western country, and I suppose the phe- 
nomenon is not uncommon. For an hour or 
more it remained; we never seemed to get 
nearer to it ; it was an eerie thing — the 
earth-light of the moon on that side, — I saw 
it all the time. 

" The difference you spoke of," I began, with 
my eyes upon that spectral pool, " is only that 
change which belongs to life, dissolving like 
illusion, but not itself illusion. I am not 
aware of any break; it is the old life in a 
higher form with clearer selfhood. Life, in 
the soul especially, seems less a state of being 
than a thing of transformation, whose successive 
shapes we wear ; and so far as that change is 
self-determined," I continued, making almost 
an effort to think, so weird was that scene 
before us, "the soul proceeds by foreknoAv- 
ledge of itself in the ideal, and wills the change 
by ideal living, which is not a conflict with the 



THE RIDE 323 

actual but a process out of it, conditioned in 
almost a Darwinian way on that brain-futuring 
which entered into the struggle for animal ex- 
istence even with such enormous modifying 
power. In our old days, under the sway of 
new scientific knowledge, we instinctively saw 
man in the perspective of nature, and then man 
seemed almost an after-thought of nature ; but 
having been produced, late in her material his- 
tory, and gifted with foresight that distinguished 
him from all else m her scheme, his own evolu- 
tion gathered thereby that speed which is so 
perplexing a contrast to the inconceivable slow- 
ness of ihe orbing of stars and the building of 
contineMs. He has used his powers of pre- 
science f 6,r his own ends ; but, fanciful as the 
thought is^ might it happen that through his 
control of eltmental forces and his acquaintance 
with infinite space, he should reach the point of 
applying prescience in nature's own material 
frame, and wield the world for the better ac- 
complishment of her apparent ends, — that, 
though unimaginable now, would constitute the 
true polarity to her blind and half-chaotic mo- 
tions, — chaotic in intelligence, I mean, and to 
the moral reason. Unreal as such a thought is, 



324 HEART OF MAN 

a glimpse of some such feeling toward nature is 
discernible in the work of some impressionist 
landscape painters, who present colour and at- 
mosphere and space without human intention, 
as a kind of artistry of science, having the same 
sort of elemental substance and interest that 
scientific truth has as an object of knowledge, 
— a curious form of the beauty of truth." 

We spoke of some illustrations of this, the 
scene before us lending atmosphere and sugges- 
tion to the talk, and enforcing it like nature's 
comment. " But," I continued, " what I had in 
mind to say was concerning our dead selves. 
The old phrase, life is a continual dying, is 
true, and, once gone, life is death ; and some- 
times so much of it has been gathered to the 
past, such definite portions of it are laid away, 
that we can look, if we will, in the lake of 
memory on the faces of the dead selves which 
once we were." Instinctively we looked on 
the mystic glamour in the low valley, as on that 
Lake of the Dead Souls I spoke of. I went on 
after the natural pause, — I could not help it, 
— " ' I was a different man, then,' we say, 
with a touch of sadness, perhaps, but often 
with better thoughts, and always with a 



THE EIDE 325 

feeling of mystery. How old is the youth 
before he is aware of the fading away of 
vitality out of early beliefs ? and then he feels 
the quick passing of the enthusiasms of open- 
ing life, as one cause after another, one hero, 
one poet, disclosing the great interests of life, 
in turn engages his heart. As time goes on, 
and life comes out in its true perspective, one 
thing with another, and he discovers the in- 
completeness of single elements of ardour in the 
whole of life, and also the defects of wisdom, 
art, and action in those books and men that 
had won his full confidence and what he called 
perfect allegiance, there comes often a moment 
of pause, as if this growth had in it some- 
thing irrational and derogatory. The thinkers 
whose words of light and leading were the 
precious truth itself, the poets he idolized, the 
elders he trusted, fall away, and others stand 
in their places, who better appeal to his older 
mind, his finer impulses, his sounder judgment ; 
and what true validity can these last have in 
the end? After a decade he can almost see 
his youth as something dead, his early man- 
hood as something that will die. The poet, 
especially, who gives expression to himself, 



826 HEART OF MAN 

and puts his life at its period into a book, 
feels, as each work drops from his hand, that 
it is a portion of a self that is dead, though 
it was life in the making ; and so with the 
embodiments of life in action, the man looks 
back on past greatness, past romance ; for all 
life, working itself out — desire into achieve- 
ment — dies to the man. Vital life lies always 
before. It is a strange thought that only by 
the death of what we now are, can we enter 
into our own hopes and victories; that it is 
by the slaying of the self which now is that 
the higher self takes life ; that it is through 
such self-destruction that we live. The inter- 
mediate state seems a waste, and the knowledge 
that it is intermediate seems to impair its value; 
but this is the way ordained by which we must 
live, and such is life's magic that in each 
stage, from childhood to age, it is lived with 
trustfulness in itself. It is needful only, how- 
ever much we outlive, to live more and better, 
and through all to remain true to the high 
causes, the faithful loves, the sacred impulses, 
that have given our imperfect life of the past 
whatever of nobility it may have ; so shall 
death forever open into life. But," I ended, 



DHE RIDE 327 

^es toward the sweep of the 
wind blows, and leaves the 
hence and whither, the wild 
i only the poet is troubled 
y, and happy is he who can 
ich thought of life." 
i river had died out, and the 
ommon stream lit with the 
)rdered far off to the west 
jtinguishable country. We 
own the valley along that 
er the land. The broken 
rose into immense slopes of 
magnified by the night at- 
3sty, heavy with deep dark- 
, stood massive and vast in 
t, like a sea. Then fell on 
strange insistence the sense 
cnounded power of the earth, 
subsidence of ocean in an 
,nd more awful might. The 
o loom and lift, almost with 
strength of the whirl of the 
3e. Deeper into the shadow 
every echoing tread of the 
■ some mysterious presence 



826 HEART OF MA 

and puts his life at its peri 
feels, as each work drops fro; 
it is a portion of a self that 
it was life in the making ; 
embodiments of life in actior 
back on past greatness, past 
life, working itself out — det 
ment — dies to the man. Vit 
before. It is a strange thou 
the death of what we now i 
into our own hopes and vici 
by the slaying of the self w 
the higher self takes life ; t 
such self-destruction that we 
mediate state seems a waste, a 
that it is intermediate seems t 
but this is the way ordained 1 
live, and such is life's maj 
stage, from childhood to ag€ 
trustfulness in itself. It is i 
ever much we outlive, to live 
and through all to remain 
causes, the faithful loves, the 
that have given our imperfe 
whatever of nobility it ma; 
death forever open into life. 



THE BIDE 827 

lifting my moist eyes toward the sweep of the 
dark slopes, "the wind blows, and leaves the 
mystic to inquire whence and whither, the wild 
shrub blossoms and only the poet is troubled 
to excuse its beauty, and happy is he who can 
live without too much thought of life." 

The sheen of the river had died out, and the 
creek was only a common stream lit with the 
high moon, and bordered far off to the west 
with the low indistinguishable country. We 
drove in silence down the valley along that 
shelf of road under the land. The broken 
bluffs on the left rose into immense slopes of 
rolling prairie, and magnified by the night at- 
mosphere into majesty, heavy with deep dark- 
ness in their folds, stood massive and vast in 
the dusk moonlight, like a sea. Then fell on 
me and grew with strange insistence the sense 
of this everlasting mounded power of the earth, 
like the rise and subsidence of ocean in an 
element of slower and more awful might. The 
solid waste began to loom and lift, almost with 
the blind internal strength of the whirl of the 
planet through space. Deeper into the shadow 
we plunged with every echoing tread of the 
hoofs. The lair of some mysterious presence 



82B HEAKT 01^ MAN 

was about us, — unshaped, unlocalized, as in 
some place of antique awe before tbe time of 
temples or of gods. It seemed a corporal thing. 
If I stretched out my hand I should touch it 
like the ground. It came out from all the 
black rifts, it rolled from the moonlit distinct 
heights, it filled the chill air, — it was an en- 
velopment — it would be an engulf ment — horse 
and man we were sinking in it. Then it was 
— most in all my days — that I felt dense mys- 
tery overwhelming me. '' O infinite earth," I 
thought, " our unknowing mother, our unknow- 
ing grave!" — "What is it?" he said, feel- 
ing my wrist straighten where it lay on his 
shoulder, and the tremor, and the hand seeking 
him. Was it a premonition ? " Nothing," I 
answered, and did not tell him ; but he began 
to cheer me with lighter talk, and win me back 
to the levels of life, and under his sensitive and 
loving ways, the excitement of the ride died out, 
and an hour later, after midnight, we drove 
into the silent town. We put the ponies up, 
praising them with hand and voice ; and then he 
took both my hands in his and said, " The truest 
thing you ever said was what you wrote me, ' We 
live each others' lives.' " That was his thanks. 



THE RIDE 829 

O brave and tender heart, now long lapped 
under the green fold of that far prairie in his 
niche of earth ! How often I see him as in 
our first days, — the boy of seventeen summers, 
lying on his elbows over his Thackeray, read- 
ing by the pictures, and laughing to himself 
hour after hour ; and many a prairie adven- 
ture, many happy days and fortunate moments 
come back, with the strength and bloom of 
youth, as I recall the manly figure, the sensi- 
tive and eager face, and all his resolute ways. 
Who of us knows what he is to another? He 
could not know how much his life entered 
into mine, and still enters. But he is dead; 
and I have set down these weak and stam- 
mering words of the life we began together, 
not for the strong and sure, but for those 
who, though true hearts, find it hard to lay 
hold of truth, and doubt themselves, in the 
hope that some younger comrade of life, though 
unknown, may make them of avail and find in 
them the dark leading of a hand. 



THREE STUDIES IN 
LITERATURE. 



BY 



LEWIS EDWARDS GATES, 

Assistant Professor of English in Harvard University, 



Cloth. i2mo. $1.50. 



FRANCIS JEFFREY. ASPECTS OF THE 

CARDINAL NEWMAN. ROMANTIC PERIOD OF 

MATTHEW ARNOLD. ENGLISH LITERATURE. 



^'Professor Gates is fortunate in his subjects; his 
subjects are fortunate in his justly discriminating 
appreciation. The reader is fortunate in his illumi- 
nating treatment of these notable characters, often 
misunderstood and disparaged, — the brilliant re- 
viewer, the spiritual rhetorician, the humanistic critic. 
These masterly Studies should be in the hands of 
all students of our literature in this century." 

— Otitlook. 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY, 

66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK. 








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